


Fractures

by Sadako1966



Category: Katawa Shoujo
Genre: Adventure, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-12 20:24:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 53,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4493490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sadako1966/pseuds/Sadako1966
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Time makes fools of us all…”</p><p>Six years after Hisao Nakai fell to his death from the roof of Yamaku Academy, the young women whose lives he might have bound together have instead spiralled apart. With the bonds between them weakened by time, they have all taken their own, entirely separate routes through life – some finding a kind of happiness, others walking a darker path.</p><p>But now they are in danger. Hunted and attacked, they must re-forge what was broken, undo the damage life has wrought on their fractured friendships. If they don’t repair yesterday, they might not survive today…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Run Down

Emi Takada was halfway across the Ministop’s parking lot, a full bag of groceries in either hand and her car keys held in her mouth, when she heard someone shout her name.

Her pace faltered. It had rained while she had been in the store, and the tarmac under her feet was wet and slick; with her balance ruined by the groceries it would be easy to turn too quickly and end up on her backside. Instead she stopped, planted her left foot solidly and swung herself around, inwardly cursing her bottled water habit. “Mmf?”

“Mrs Takada?” There was a young woman trotting towards her, maybe eighteen, wearing a dark blue Ministop uniform. “Please wait!”

Emi put one of her bags down and took the keys from her mouth. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m so sorry.” The woman skated awkwardly to a halt and bowed. “Please forgive me for shouting, but I’m afraid you forgot this.” She straightened, took a folded carrier bag from her pocket and handed it over with both hands. “It’s your purse. You left it on the counter.”

“What? You’re kidding. How did I..?” Emi took the bag from her and reached inside. “God, I’m an idiot.”

“I must have distracted you, please forgive me.”

Emi grinned. The girl reminded her of someone from a long time ago. “Seriously, it’s fine. Got a busy day, that’s all. Stuff on my mind.” She put the purse into her pocket. “Thanks for running out here.”

The girl nodded, wrapped her arms around herself. The wind was rising, a cutting November chill. “That’s quite all right. Do you need any help getting your stuff into the car?”

“No, I’ve got it.”

“Um, Mrs Takada?” The girl was frowning. “That’s your car there, isn’t it?”

Emi glanced back over her shoulder. Her little blue Toyota was a few metres away, nestling alongside a row of scooters. “Yup.”

“Should the wheel be like that?”

“What? Like what?” She put her other bag down and took a couple of steps closer to the car. “There’s nothing wrong with the wheel, it was fine when I got… Oh.“

“Maybe you drove over a nail,” said the girl sadly.

“Aww…” Emi sagged. The rear tyre was completely flat, practically oozing off the wheel rim. “Now what?”

“I can call the JAF if you like.”

“No.” Emi squared her shoulders. “No, I can do this. It’s just changing the wheel, right? How hard can it be?”

“Ah, very?”

“I’ve got a spare. I think I’ve got a spare.” Emi would have liked to have crouched to study the wheel more closely, but crouching was one of the few things she had trouble with. She bent over to it instead, supporting herself on the car’s flank and mentally calculating how badly this was going to ruin her day. “Half an hour on this, drive home, stock the fridge, get changed… I can be at the bar before seven, easy.”

“Bar?” Determined to be helpful, the girl had picked up both shopping bags and was trotting around to the back of the Toyota.

“I’m meeting a friend. Haven’t seen her in a long time, so I really don’t want to be late. Don’t worry, I won’t be drinking.” _Much._

“Mrs Takada…” The girl had frozen behind the Toyota, staring down at the other rear wheel. She turned to Emi with a nervous, lopsided smile on her face.

“Um…  Would you like me to call you a cab?”

 

The Ministop wasn’t very far from Emi’s apartment. While the cab fare wouldn’t have been much, it was still an expense she hadn’t planned for, and most of her money was still vanishing into legal fees. Despite the weight of her bags, it made more sense to walk.

She would go back to the car tomorrow, and call the JAF on her mother’s tab.

She made her way carefully. The urge to push herself faster still rang at the back of her mind – it was always there, prodding her constantly – but today she found it easier than usual to resist, and not just because of the weight of her groceries. The damage to her car had shaken her more than she cared to admit.

One ruined tyre she could pass off as an accident, even when closer inspection had revealed what looked very much like a knife-cut deep through the sidewall. To find both rear wheels identically assaulted was genuinely frightening.

Emi had enemies, or at least people who didn’t like her any much; what she had received through the mail a week ago was proof enough of that. She hadn’t realised that any of them were capable of slashing her tyres, though.

The sound of a car horn snapped her out of her reverie. She glanced about, and realised that she had already made it halfway home. The pedestrian crossing was only a dozen metres ahead – she could cross the road there, make her way back around the nursery and then take a shortcut up the little hill that led to her block. Ten minutes max, fifteen if she was careful. She smiled.

It was dark now, and getting colder. Despite her thick winter coat and scarf, Emi wanted very much to be indoors.

Another car horn. She peered back over her shoulder, saw a white Honda van pulling out into the road. Something was parked back there, a tatty-looking green Ford, practically in the middle of the road. No wonder he was getting hooted at.

Emi trotted up to the crossing, paused there to make sure nothing was close. She stepped out.

Dimly, she heard the Ford gun its engine.

For several seconds the sound simply didn’t filter through from her ears to her brain. It was stupid, impossible. She was on the crossing, so how could anyone be accelerating towards her? The notion was too ridiculous to consider.

She stopped, halfway across, and turned to see a wall of green metal bellowing out of the darkness.

Emi was quick on her feet, even the ones she was wore to go shopping. She jerked back, took two swift steps in reverse. Easily enough to give the moron space to go past.

The Ford swung towards her.

She yelped in horror, hurled herself backward, the bags flying from her grip. The heel of her left foot hit the kerb. She flailed, stumbled, and then the Ford was on her, slamming into her right leg.

The impact was ferocious. Emi was spun clear over in the air, sent whirling down into the sidewalk. She hit face-first, the breath hammered out of her as she struck, rolled over and over. In the light of the Ford’s tail lights she could see her right leg in the road, whirling like a top.

Someone was running towards her. The Ford had slowed. Sickeningly, she heard it shift into reverse gear, but then the driver must have thought better of coming back to finish the job. Too many witnesses, now.

She sagged back as the car surged away.

There were hands on her, helping her sit up. “I’m sorry,” she was saying to them. Why was she apologising? She was starting to shiver uncontrollably, nausea roiling in her gut. “Sorry, I’m so sorry...”

“Miss, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she managed. “Fine. I think I’m fine.”

“ _Oh my God_ ,” someone gasped. “ _Her leg_ …”

Suddenly, Emi wanted to laugh. “It’s okay,” she muttered. “They’re supposed to come off.”

Instead of laughing, though, she started crying. It took quite some time before she was able to stop.


	2. Paperchase

She was still apologising the following morning. “Sorry Lilly. This isn’t exactly how I’d planned our big reunion.”

Lilly Satou smiled, shaking her head. “I hardly think going to a bar would have been appropriate last night, do you?”

“I dunno, I sure felt like getting hammered after the police were done with me.” Emi was at the counter of her kitchenette, holding a teaspoon. Her own mug already had a double spoonful of instant coffee in it, but as she had started to scoop out more for Lilly she had realised she had no idea how strong to make it.

She could have just asked, but being able to give her friend nothing but Nescafe was shameful enough already. “Ah, sugar?”

“No thank you.”

“I should have remembered, sorry.”

She heard Lilly chuckle softly. “After five years?”

Emi tipped in a medium-sized spoonful, topped both mugs up with hot water then carried them over to the table. Lilly was sitting on the far side, her back straight, hands folded elegantly in front of her. Looking at her made Emi feel small and clumsy and badly-made.

Time had been kind to Lilly Satou. She was, Emi had to admit, just as pretty as she had been back at Yamaku Academy; her pale features fine and unlined, her hair still as golden and flowing as before.

If there was any real difference to her, it was that she seemed to have filled out, just a little, around the hips. Perhaps the food in Scotland was better than Emi had heard. “Here you go. I’m so sorry, it’s just crappy instant. I bought some good stuff yesterday, but it was still in the road when a truck came past, and-“

“Emi, please.” Lilly put a hand out, her long fingers brushing the mug until she found the handle. “No more apologies. You’ve had a very nasty experience that could, quite frankly, have been much worse. Postponing our evening out for a day or two is a small price to pay, I assure you.”

Emi had to take a long breath before she could trust herself to speak. “Thanks, Lilly. And for last night, too.” What had started as a hurried phone call to explain why she wouldn’t be able to get to the bar had turned into a tearful two hours. “Hey, maybe we could go out tonight? I’m not going to be able to train for a few days, so it’ll help take my mind off stuff.”

“I’d like that. But remember, I’ll be working in Japan for at least three months. We’ll have plenty of time to catch up.”

Emi pulled out the other chair - there was only room for two - and sat down. As the weight came off her right leg a needle of pain drove itself up into her knee, and she winced.

Lilly caught it, of course. “Are you all right?”

“Just my leg. Mainly the part I haven’t got.” She saw a confused frown cross Lilly’s face. “Phantom limb stuff. It’s worse when I’m stressed. Been off and on for the past week or so, but now it feels like someone’s trying to bend my toes back to my heel.”

Emi reached down to ease her right stump out of the prosthetic, massaging the bruised skin with both hands. She’d been extraordinarily lucky not to have been more seriously injured by the impact – had she been wearing one of her more tightly-fitting legs she could easily have shattered a bone.

That was something she preferred not to think about. At all. “I’ll be okay. I’m just glad this happened in November. If I’d been in summer clothes I’d be one big gravel rash by now.”

“Have you had any more contact from the police?”

“Nah.” Emi took a gulp of coffee. “Ew. They’re just treating it as a hit-and-run.”

“You’re certain it wasn’t.”

“He put the car in _reverse_ , Lilly. If those people hadn’t been there…” She shuddered. “God, where did I go wrong?”

Lilly scowled. “Don’t blame yourself for this.”

“I’m not, I’m blaming him. Or one of his bastard friends…” She pushed the mug away. “The only thing I blame myself for is marrying him. Honestly, I spent so long trying to keep everyone at arms’ reach. The one time I properly let someone in, turns out he’s an asshole.”

“Well, yes,” Lilly replied. “When I looked you up I was rather surprised to find under your married name.”

“Trust me, as soon as the divorce comes through, it’ll be Ibarazaki on everything.”

She felt Lilly’s long fingers brush her own. “Emi, I’m so sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

“It’s just life.” She put her other hand over Lilly’s. “We wanted different things. I wanted medals, he wanted to screw the entire female population of Chiba. And he wasn’t even nasty about it until I told him I wanted a divorce. I guess he took that as some kind of affront to his manhood, or something.”

“Which wasn’t exactly impressive to begin with, if I recall correctly.”

Emi supressed a grin. She’s been in email contact with Lilly for a while, and the subject had come up more than once. “That’s what drives me crazy, you know? It doesn’t make any sense. Sending scary letters through the mail is the kind of jerk move he’s capable of, sure. But slashing my tyres and trying to squish me with a car? That’s a step up.”

“Letters?”

“Okay, letter. Not really a letter. Just a… Thing. Don’t ask.” She folded her arms, puffed her cheeks angrily. “For Christ’s sake, it’s not like I want half his stuff. He can keep it all, I don’t want anything to do with him anymore. I just want my name back.”

“Emi, this… Thing you mentioned.”

“Seriously, don’t ask about that. You don’t want to know, it was horrible.”

Lilly looked nervous, almost frightened. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to press you on the matter.”

A knot of unease began to tighten in Emi’s chest. “Lilly? What’s going on?”

“Please,” the woman whispered. “What did you receive?”

“It was…” She turned away, unwilling to see the expression on Lilly’s face. “Something cut out of a newspaper. About that boy who got stabbed.”

Emi wasn’t sure which newspaper the clipping had been taken from. The story had been given wide coverage for a few days, partly because of the random, brutal nature of the killing, but largely because of the nature of the victim. Osamu Kodai had been a promising graduate, a rising star in the field of architectural engineering. At 24 years old, he already had two design awards to his name.

He was also a double amputee, the aftermath of a childhood infection. Left leg below the knee, left arm below the elbow. Emi had sat two rows behind him at Yamaku Academy. “It was a copy, a photocopy. And somebody had cut out a picture of my face and glued it on over his. It was just this, sick, awful… What are you doing?”

Lilly was reaching into her bag. She pulled out a roughly-folded sheet of white paper, spread it out on the table, and pushed it across.

Emi jumped back, the chair scraping, tipping behind her. “Shit,” she hissed. “Oh _shit_. Lilly, when did you-“

“Three days after I arrived.”

“That’s… Oh God, that’s the day I got mine.” Emi was staring at the paper, her skin crawling, unwilling to get too close to the ghastly thing. She was still near enough to see the picture of Lilly’s face, roughly cut out from some old photo and glued over Kodai’s. “Wait, how did you-“

“We have a secretary to deal with anything not in Braille. She described it to me.” Lilly patted the table until her fingers reached the page, then took it back and re-folded it. “Her reaction was very much the same as yours.”

“Why would he do that? Why would he send something to you?”

“We have to consider the possibility,” Lilly said quietly, “that he didn’t.”

“Then who…”

“Someone with a green car, perhaps.” Lilly’s hands were folded again, just as before, but now her knuckles were white. “You said it yourself, it makes no sense for your husband to be involved with this. Even if the divorce was a reason to wish you harm, it’s already in process – anything untoward happening to you would automatically reflect back to him. And to involve me would make even less sense. I know nothing about him, he knows nothing about me. No, I believe this is unconnected.” She sighed. “Which, to be honest, makes it all the more frightening.”

Emi swallowed hard. “I feel a bit sick.”

“You and me both. The letter you received, do you still have it?”

She shook her head. “I binned it. Lilly, we have to tell the police about this.”

“Hm. I wonder how much credence they’d give it. They’ve already dismissed your incident as little more than a traffic violation, and without your letter we haven’t got much to tell them.”

“Why us, though?” Emi found herself glancing towards her front door. Had she locked it properly? “Why you and me?”

“You’re assuming it’s just the two of us.”

There was a very long silence. Then Emi put her leg back on and stood up. “Lilly, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to call my mother.”

 

Emi lived within the confines of three rooms; the main room with its TV area and kitchenette, a bathroom and a single bedroom. The total combined floorspace of the apartment was probably, Emi guessed, somewhat smaller than Lilly’s closet back in Scotland. But while the place was compact, it was clean and comfortable and, most important of all, it was _hers_ , paid for by two part-time jobs and the modest sponsorship deals she had made after her first gold medal.

Maybe, she told herself at least once a day, she would look for somewhere larger when the divorce became final.

The telephone was next to her bed. There had been a time when Emi used to receive phone calls at all hours, sometimes very late at night, and although those days were long past she could never quite bring herself to move the phone back to the kitchenette. Besides, there was a clock built into it.

Emi closed the bedroom door behind her. She sat on the bed, moving a couple of soft toys to make space, and took the phone from its dock.

Her thumb hovered over the speed-dial button.

She watched the tiny bright digits of the clock, seconds counting up, dropping back to zero, increasing again. And again. The slow climb and then the fall, tumbling back to the start.

A child learns to walk. Learns to run. Becomes good at running, faster and stronger than the other children. Works hard, runs fast, shattering slam screech of twisted metal, blood and torn meat, shattered bone.

Back to zero.

A girl learns to walk on new legs. Learns to run again. Becomes good at running. Finds friends, finds success, works her way through school. Succeeding academically doesn’t come naturally to her, but her friends support her and help her and a young man she had been asked to befriend falls to his death from the school roof. There are investigations, media attention, pressure, disruption.

The school is gone. Her friends are gone. Back to zero.

_How many times?_ Emi thought bitterly. _How many ladders do I climb, only to find the snake waiting for me at the top?_ She had worked at her marriage, worked hard, and his affairs still brought her low. She had tried to rebuild her remaining friendships after leaving Yamaku, and events had conspired to demolish them.

She had built herself a life, and now someone was trying to take it away.

Too many zeros had gone by; Lilly would be waiting for her. Emi pressed the button, held the phone to her ear, listened nervously to the dull electronic blurting of dial tones. _Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay_.

“ _Good morning,_ _Ibarazaki residence_.”

In spite of everything, she smiled. “Residence? Since when have you lived in a mansion?”

“ _Since I got caller display, sweetheart. How are you?_ ”

“I’m fine,” she lied. “Listen, Mom-“

“ _How did last night go?_ ”

“Huh? What? Oh…” Emi laughed nervously. “Ah, didn’t happen. Lilly was jetlagged, we might try again tonight.”

“ _That’s a shame. Aren’t you training tomorrow, though?_ ”

“I’ll be a good girl, don’t worry. Hey Mom, I can’t hang around, I just needed to ask you…”

She trailed off. How could she say this without sounding insane? Or worse, sending her mother into a panic.

“ _Emi? Is everything all right?_ ”

“I think so. But… Look, has anything funny happened over the past couple of days?”

“ _Funny?_ ”

“You know. Out of the ordinary. Anyone hanging around, strangers…”

“ _Oh Emi, is this to do with the divorce?_ ”

“Maybe.”

Her mother sighed. “ _Well, there was that man this morning. That was a little strange_.”

Suddenly the bedroom was rather cold. “What man?”

“ _Some young fellow. He called round early, said he was a friend of yours, but to be honest I didn’t think that was likely. I kept the door on the chain and sent him on his way. I thought he was some autograph hunter, to be honest_.”

“What did he look like?”

“ _I didn’t really get a good look at him. He was wearing one of those horrible hood things_.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“ _Yes, he asked where he might find your friend Rin._ ”

Emi couldn’t remember the last time she had connected those last three words. “What… What did you…”

“ _I told him she was in Niiza. I’m sorry, Emi dear, was that wrong of me? I just wanted him to go away_.”

“No, that’s fine Mom, you did the right thing. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, really.” She took a deep breath. “I’d better go. I’ll call you again later, okay?”

“ _Are you sure everything’s all right?_ ”

“Yeah. But Mom? If that guy comes back, don’t answer the door. Just call the police. I think he might be bad news.”

 

“Jetlagged,” said Lilly as she came back into the kitchenette. “Hm.”

_Curse your super-hearing!_ “Don’t ‘hm’ me. I just don’t want her to worry, okay?”

“She will anyway. She’s your mother.”

“Damage limitation.” Emi sat down. “Listen, Lilly… Have you got Rin’s number on your phone?”

A small, rather proud smile. “I’ve got _everyone’s_ number.”

Emi narrowed her eyes. “Damn, you’re organised. I wanna be you when I grow up. Could you call her, please?”

“Of course, but-“

“If she sees it’s me she won’t answer.”

Lilly nodded sadly. “Ah. I hadn’t realised things were that bad between you.”

“They’re not,” Emi muttered. “They’re worse.”


	3. Rise and Fall

There were just two canvasses in Rin Tezuka’s workspace.

One, part-finished, was on the floor in front of her painting chair. It was clamped to a small, custom-made stand, which in turn sat in the exact centre of a rubberised mat that protected the floor and stopped the canvass moving while she worked. The other was at her left shoulder, standing high on an old, paint-spattered wooden easel and blocking most of the hard winter light coming in through the window.

Rin had put it there as a kind of tease. No, an _incentive_. An incentive with a teasing element, as if the taller canvass was watching her work, waiting for her attentions, upright and patient and glittering with promise. It was blank, pristine white, lovingly primed with three coats of fine gesso. It would take paint like kisses.

“Shh,” she smiled at it. “You know the deal. First I pay the bills, then we’ll play.”

She had no words for the smaller canvass. It was a necessary thing, soulless commercial dreck bound for the cover of some video game or magazine, a wild-haired warrior thrusting his impossible sword upwards into a sky shot with lightning and monstrous cloud. The picture was largely figurative, which held no interest for Rin at all, but she’d managed to sneak some of her own imagery into the background. Her customers seemed to like it when she did that, as long as she was reasonably restrained and used one of her false names on the invoice.

Rin took a fine brush between the toes of her right foot, mixed a little white and blue, and sent reflected lightning arcing down the flanks of the hero’s sword. Purely for her own amusement she had calculated the likely weight of that weapon, while she’d been sketching it out; almost a fifth of a tonne. He’d need a block and tackle just to get it out its scabbard.

“Idiot,” she muttered.

It was okay to talk to herself in the apartment, as long as she made sure it didn’t become a habit. Rin had to be very careful about such things, which didn’t exactly come naturally to her. It was hard, a continual effort, but not impossible. In the past two years she had successfully become one of the most careful people she knew.

Not that she knew very many people at all. Even the doctors didn’t visit anymore.

Rin had learned her lessons. She carried a label on her, she knew that now; invisible but indelible, a black mark against the ledger of her lifespan. It would always be with her, and if she let down her guard at the wrong moment it would rise up and destroy her.

Being herself was fine, in private. Out in the world, she had to be someone very different.

Beyond the window, behind the white canvass, something moved. Probably a bird. Rin ignored it. She had a deadline, and no time to go looking at birds or clouds or butterflies.

No time to be Rin today.

The hero’s armour needed more definition. She began mixing a series of highlighting shades; reflex work, barely requiring thought at all. Instead she let herself think about the large canvass again.

It was a seducer, no doubt about that. Too attractive for its own damn good. Once she was alone with it, she told herself, hiding a small smile, she would have her way with it. It would be hers completely. Wicked things would  happen.

The fine brush was loaded with base highlight. Rin eased her foot closer to the stand, cool rubber against her heel as she braced herself for control, and then she was jerking her leg back as the high-pitched, insistent chirping of the telephone hacked like a blade into her concentration.

As she turned to glare at it, wondering who could possibly be trying to call her, something slammed with unspeakable force into her head.

The world flared, a pulse of white-light agony and then the apartment was tipping around her, tilting, gravity curling up around her like a tentacle. Dimly, some small, still-rational part of her mind became aware that she was falling, tumbling sideways off the chair, but there was nothing she could do about it. The connection between intent and action was gone, utterly severed by that horrible impact.

The floor came up to meet her, battered into her right shoulder, her hip, the side of her face.

The air was full of strangeness, glittering shards and flying droplets of dark crimson. Rin rolled onto her back, vaguely noticing that the window was in the process of flying apart, that her pristine, untouched canvass was marred by a single, tiny hole dead at the centre.

Cold white light was coming in through that hole.

The room was fading, shadows spiralling in on her like the untidy strokes of a vast calligraphy brush. Rin watched the light fail, the room spilling up and away, falling glass shards and rain of blood vanishing slowly, fading into fog, then shadow, then darkness.

By then, there was almost no pain. A few regrets, but they were fleeting too. In the end, all she felt as the night closed in was a vague curiosity as to what would happen next.

But of course, what happened next was nothing at all.


	4. Empty Canvass

Lilly called Rin’s apartment three times: once just after Emi’s conversation with her mother, once while they were waiting for the cab to take them back to the Ministop, and again in the Ministop itself, while they sat at a table and waited for the JAF engineer to replace Emi’s tyres.

“Still nothing, I’m afraid,” Lilly told her, putting the phone back in her bag. “Are you sure she still lives there?”

“No, not really.” Emi pushed her plate away, the sandwich Lilly had bought her almost untouched. “I haven’t heard anything about her moving, but I don’t think anyone would tell me if she did.”

“If she has, maybe the new occupant can give us a forwarding address.” Lilly paused, tilting her head as she listened. “Your first tyre appears to be on.”

“Maybe she’s in the park. She used like going there to watch clouds and stuff.” Emi chuckled. “She used to call me up at all hours, you know? Two, three in the morning, to tell me all about rainbows or entropy or this really cool bug she saw one time.”

“You used to be very close.”

“Eh, less than you’d think. I mean, back at school I’d help her get dressed and whatever, but that’s just the outside of her, and outsides don’t mean a lot to Rin. She’s all about the _inside_. Of her head, I mean, and nobody really gets to see that. Not even me.”

Lilly coloured slightly. “I have to admit, I always found her, well, rather hard work.”

“It’s okay, everyone does.”

There was a period of silence. Finally, Lilly spoke again.

“You never told me what happened between you.”

“Nothing to tell,” Emi lied. She was doing that a lot lately. “She had the breakdown, what, three years ago? While she was trying to put her second exhibition together.”

“I would have liked to seen the first one.”

“Yeah, that was…” She smiled at the memory. “That was fun. We weren’t long out of Yamaku, she had all these ideas… It was, I dunno, personal. Hers, you know?”

“What changed?”

“Her old art teacher came back. Son of a bitch got into her life again, started pushing her to take her career to the next level. I guess he’d heard about the first exhibition, tried to get a piece for himself. But what he wanted was too big. He was calling in these arty types from all over.”

“She could have said no.”

“Rin’s never been much for thinking things through. And…” She looked away, through the Ministop’s glass frontage to the street beyond. “And I wasn’t there to help her. We’d already started seeing each other less by then. I was planning a wedding, she was working hard on the exhibition. Too hard, though. She broke. And I was too busy with my own stupid problems to fix her.”

“We can’t fix people, Emi. Trust me, I know that all too well.” Lilly’s fingers brushed the face of her watch, checking the time. She was probably worried about traffic. “Did you try to get back in touch after she left hospital?”

“Yeah, a few times. But she was under close supervision for a year, while she was living with her folks. I don’t think they let anyone talk to her.”

“It’s only natural they’d want to protect her.”

 _Yeah,_ thought Emi bitterly. _From me_. “At least that teacher wasn’t bothering her any more. He was in Osaka last I heard. Nobody wants to know you if they think you’ve been ill that way.”

Lilly nodded sadly. “I never realised how deeply that stigma is ingrained here, until I went away. Poor Rin. She must have suffered terribly.”

Those words went into Emi’s gut like a blade. It took every scrap of self-control she had to prevent herself from crying out.

“Second tyre’s on,” she managed. “I think we should go.”

 

Emi Takada was skilled enough at driving with her prosthetics that she had never needed a modified vehicle. Still, the journey from Matsudo to Niiza was a lot longer than she liked to go without rest; by the time she pulled up in front of Rin’s apartment block both her legs were stiff and aching.

She opened the car door and swung herself sideways, but stayed sitting for a moment, feet on the tarmac, breathing hard, trying to relax her thigh muscles. “Okay, when we go back we’re stopping halfway.”

Lilly was already out of the car. “I should have suggested that, Emi. I’m sorry.”

All these years, Emi thought wryly, and Lilly Satou’s instinctive need to look after everyone around her hadn’t diminished in the slightest. She pulled herself upright. “Nah, my fault. I’m always in too much of a hurry.”

Emi heard the soft click of Lilly’s cane extending, then passenger door thudding closed. “It’s very quiet here.”

“Yeah…” She closed the driver side door. Lilly was right, there seemed to be no-one about. “You know what else is weird? The parking lot’s half empty but there are cars parked on the road. Like there was something big here and now it’s gone.”

“Maybe a delivery of some kind?” ventured Lilly, sounding utterly unconvinced.

“I hope so.” She took Lilly’s hand – purely to guide her friend along, she told herself, and nothing at all to do with being frightened – and began to walk up the short pathway to the block’s front door.

“I’ve just thought,” Lilly said. “How are we going to get in?”

“It’s okay, I’ve still got keys.”

Lilly’s cane tapped lightly at the pathway, quick and skilled. Despite being completely unfamiliar with her surroundings she was moving along quite fast. Still, Emi was continually having to fight the urge to leave her and run ahead. “Steps coming up here.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

Her key still worked. Before long they were making their way along the narrow corridor that led to the rear of the block.

The inside of the building was even more eerily silent, the stillness only adding to Emi’s growing unease. Even if she hadn’t been desperately worried about Rin’s safety she would have been unsettled here. As it was, it felt like her heart was trying to batter its way out of her chest. “She’s just down here. Hey, if she opens the door at all, you’ll do the talking, right?”

“If you’d feel more comfortable that way, of course.”

They were rounding the final corner. “More like I don’t want her to kick me again. Last time we-“

Emi froze, jolting to a halt. She felt Lilly stumble against her.

“Emi? What’s wrong? Why have you stopped?”

The door to Rin’s apartment was partway open, the lock smashed, the frame criss-crossed with yellow police tape.

She couldn’t answer. The sight had stolen the breath from her. Silently, she took her hand from Lilly’s and stumbled towards the apartment. Reached through the tape and gently pushed the door open.

“Rin?”

There was no reply. She hadn’t expected there to be one, but the silence had been terrifying. She’d had to break it, even with that single, faltering syllable, or turn and run.

She lifted a length of tape, ducked under it and stepped through the doorway.

The apartment was utterly different from when she had last seen it: if there had not been a part-finished canvass lying discarded on the floor she might have been able to convince herself that Rin had moved out long ago. The floor was clean and bare, unmarked by paint splashes. The walls were unadorned, the furniture neatly arranged to open up a wide, comfortable workspace in the centre of the room. There were two low shelves against the far wall, the books ranged at just the right height for someone to be able to remove them with a foot: Emi could see works on entomology, colour theory, surrealism. A few comic books, too, at least one of which appeared to be ferociously pornographic, displayed with just the same neatness and care as the science texts.

The only things out of place in the room appeared to be a small backless chair that had been tipped over, and a ragged, plate-sized puddle of what looked like dark red paint between her and the window.

The window was covered in black plastic sheeting, fixed into place with more police tape.

“Emi?” The voice was a whisper, from close behind her. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know. The police have been here. Oh god, Lilly, I think-”

“I…” Lilly’s breath caught, a horrified gasp. “I can smell blood in that room.”

“Are you from the newspapers?”

Emi whirled. One of the other apartment doors had opened; an old woman in a brown yukata was standing halfway through it, as if unwilling to emerge fully into the corridor.

“We’re friends of Rin,” said Emi. “Is she-“

“That poor crippled girl?”

Emi’s eyes narrowed slightly. “The painter. She-“

“Such a horrible thing. Can you imagine? I’ve been afraid to go out all morning.” The woman shuffled back into her doorway, nervously looking back down the corridor. “All those policemen, they rushed away so quickly. I asked them to stay a little longer, but they were in such a hurry…”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Lilly gently. “Can you just tell us what happened?”

The woman cringed back. “I shouldn’t. The police-“

“Please, ma’am.” Emi climbed back through the tape. “I know it must have been scary, all those cops around, but we’re really worried about Rin, and –“

“Someone fired a gun!” The woman’s voice was a disbelieving hiss. “Through the window! Can you imagine?”

“A gun?” Emi stared, uncomprehending. “You… You’re saying Rin was…”

“So frightening, can you imagine? Are we becoming America now?” There was almost nothing visible of the woman now, she was sliding back into her apartment like a snail retreating into its shell. “Where are the police? Are they still out there?”

“Where is she?”

“They took her to hospital, dear. Her face was all… Oh dear, it makes me feel quite ill to think about it. All that blood…”

Lilly had stumbled back against the wall, hand to her mouth, looking utterly stricken. Emi shook her head. “No, that’s impossible. I’m sorry, ma’am, you must be mistaken. Maybe she fell, hurt herself...”

The door was already closing in her face. Emi took a step forwards, fist raised to pound on it, to demand that the old woman take back her idiot story. To beg her to tell the truth, to tell her that Rin hadn’t been shot in the face, that this was all a misunderstanding and her friend was still alive.

She was frozen. She couldn’t speak. All she could do was listen to the door click shut, and the old woman’s voice retreating behind it.

“Can you imagine? _Can you imagine?_ ”


	5. All Mad Here

They drove to the hospital in silence. Lilly tried to talk to her a few times, but Emi cut her off savagely. She would not, _could_ not speak to Lilly or to anyone else, not now. She was too sick, too horror-struck, too furious to even form words.

Besides, in order to speak she would need to think, and that was something she couldn’t bear to do.

Thankfully, Lilly soon got the idea. Only when they had parked, and Emi had switched off the Toyota’s engine, did she try again. “Do you want me to remain here?”

“No. God no. I can’t do this on my own. I’m not even sure I can do it at all.”

“Shall we wait a little while?”

Emi sucked in a long, hard breath. “Nah. I’m guessing I’ve got about twenty minutes before I lose it completely. Maybe half an hour. If it’s okay by you, when that happens I’d really like to be back in the car where no-one can see me.”

“Which makes me the perfect companion,” Lilly smiled.

 

Niiza Hospital’s reception desk was quite high. Emi had to stretch up a little to lean on it comfortably, but to be honest she was glad to take the weight off her legs for a few moments. “Um, excuse me?”

The receptionist smiled, bowed mechanically. “May I help you?”

“There was a woman brought in earlier today, a Miss Rin Tezuka?”

“Just let me check.” The soft rattle of fingers on computer keys. “Ah yes. Hm. May I ask your name please?”

“Emi Takada.”

“And your relationship to Miss Tezuka?”

“Cousin,” she said, slightly too quickly. Would the staff have detained her if she confessed to not being Rin’s relative? Emi wasn’t sure, despite having spent so long in various hospitals herself. She didn’t want to take the risk, anyway.

The receptionist looked at her a little oddly. “Of course. Well, would you like to follow me?”

Emi’s heart could not have dipped any lower at that moment. There was no error, no chance of reprieve. Had the old woman made a mistake about the nature of Rin’s injury Emi would have been simply given directions. Instead, the receptionist was already up and out from behind her desk.

Emi took Lilly’s arm. “Come on.”

They followed the receptionist together, not speaking. Emi  listened to the sound of Lilly’s tapping cane, and wondered if Rin’s parents had been informed of her death. They were probably already here, she realised.

When they met, would they be angry at her? Shout at her? Maybe Rin’s father would lose control and hit her.

She hoped so. It was nothing that she didn’t deserve.

“Here you are,” said the receptionist. “Please wait a few moments. A doctor will be with you shortly.”

Emi glanced about, slightly puzzled, as the woman trotted away. “Ah, okay…”

“Where are we?” Lilly asked. “This sounds like Accident and Emergency.”

“How would you know that?”

“I’ve had a few of both.”

As far as Emi could tell, Lilly’s assessment was entirely correct. They were at one end of a long, narrow ward, with open cubicles on both sides. Most were unoccupied, but a couple of beds were obscured by curtains.

Pulling Lilly gently along with her, Emi padded to the nearest cubicle and peeked inside.

“Omigod,” she squeaked. “It’s her she’s in there oh god oh god Lilly she’s okay!”

“I beg your pardon?” Lilly’s hand was clamped tight around Emi’s upper arm. “Are you sure?”

Rin Tezuka was sitting up on the bed, propped up against a couple of pillows. She was wearing a hospital gown, hung rather loosely over her shoulders, and there was a surgical dressing, as long as Emi’s forefinger, taped above her left eye. The skin beneath it was a marred by a florid bruise, but otherwise Rin seemed to be completely, miraculously unharmed.

She was looking at Emi with a mixture of confusion, fear, and something close to loathing.

“Yeah. Pretty sure.”

“Mrs Takada?”

Emi stumbled back out of the cubicle. A very young-looking doctor, tall and quite startlingly handsome, was standing by the door and watching her with his eyebrows somewhere up in his hairline.

Where she had been told to wait. “Hey,” she smiled nervously. “Sorry.”

“I see you’ve met Rin already.” He strode over to her, put his hand out solemnly. “I’m Doctor Higuchi.”

She took the hand, shook it. His skin was soft and quite cool. “Yeah, about that…”

“It’s quite all right. Are you here to take her home?”

“Is she well enough?” Lilly asked.

Higuchi nodded, maybe unaware that Lilly couldn’t see it. “There’s no reason for her to stay here, as long as she’s with someone who can keep an eye on her.”

“I assumed her parents would have been here.”

“They’re abroad, I believe.”

“Doctor, um, sorry…” Emi’s face felt warm. _Don’t be an idiot_ , she told herself. _He’s not that bloody handsome_. “Look, we’re pretty confused. Somebody told us Rin had been, well, shot.”

“Somebody was right. “

“Excuse me?”

“That’s why I’m having any visitors accompanied here. Don’t want anyone from the press making a fuss.” Higuchi’s expression darkened. “Your cousin was very, _very_ lucky. It looks like some maniac was playing around with an old rifle outside her apartment. Probably didn’t even know it was loaded, as if that’s any excuse.” He folded his arms. “The damn thing went off and put a bullet right through her window. Half an inch to the left, or if she’d not turned her head at that precise moment…”

“Was the gun recovered?” Lilly asked.

“Thankfully yes. The police say it blew up after the first shot, may even have injured the idiot who fired it.” He chuckled. “We’ll be looking out for _him_ , I assure you. In the meantime, Rin’s a little concussed and she’s got a nasty cut across her forehead. We’ve stitched it, but she’ll need help with the dressings.”

“I can do that,” said Emi quickly.

“Want me to show you how?”

“I’ve done it before, don’t worry.” Emi nodded at the curtain. “Is it okay if we…”

“Sure. I’ll sort out the paperwork.” He paced off. Emi found herself watching him go, and shook herself.

Lilly must have noticed it. She was smirking. “My my, what a lovely voice he had.”

“Shut up, you. I’ve been on starvation rations since before the divorce started.” She nudged Lilly back towards the cubicle. “Come on, let’s get this part over with.”

“Hm?”

“Never mind.”

Rin had obviously been listening. She was sitting perched on the edge of the bed, legs dangling. Her eyes met Emi’s just for a moment, then her gaze slid away.

“Hey Lilly.”

“Hello Rin.” Lilly frowned. “Doesn’t Emi warrant a greeting too?”

“You can say hello to her if you like, but she’s standing right next to you so I guess you’ve already met.”

“It’s okay,” said Emi. “I told you she wouldn’t want to talk to me.”

“It’s far from okay,” Lilly replied. “Rin, Emi has been very concerned about you. We both have. The least you could do-”

“Concerned?” Rin tilted her head. “Wow. Just when I thought today couldn’t get any more fucked up, along comes Emi being concerned. Sorry, Lilly, I’ve had first-hand experience of Emi’s _concern_ , and it didn’t work out so well for me.”

“Lilly,” muttered Emi. “Please just drop it.”

“What’s wrong?” Rin asked her. “Haven’t you told Lilly what happened the last time you got concerned about me?”

“She did,” breathed Lilly. “You were ill. You went into hospital for a while.“

Rin blinked, slowly, her big, bottle-green eyes half-closed. “Oh. Right. _That’s_ what she told you.”

“Of course.”

“Not the part where she called the police and told them I was insane and needed to be locked up before I hurt someone.”

Lilly paled slightly. “I beg your pardon?”

“What, didn’t you know that part?”

“I did not.”

“That’s okay, neither did I. Not until a policeman came into my studio and knocked me down and sat on me and broke two of my ribs.” Rin hadn’t moved. She was talking to Lilly, but everything she said, every flat, lifeless, monotone word was directed right at Emi. “And I ended up in, oh, what are they called? You know, those nice government hospitals where they don’t steal your money and they take really good care of you and try to make you better.”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t one of those.”

“Rin,” Emi whispered. “No-one ever meant for that to happen. You know that.”

“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything for sure. I’m crazy, remember?”

Emi bunched her fists. A cold, sick anger was flooding up from inside her, bitter as bile. “Can we at least not talk about this here?”

“Don’t you want to? You’ve never apologised for what you did, so I thought you’d be proud of yourself. Then again you’ve never admitted it either, so maybe not.” She looked perplexed. “It must be really confusing, being you.”

“Shut up, Rin,” grated Emi. “Why are you involving Lilly in this? Just shut the fuck up.”

Rin slid herself off the edge of the bed. She leaned down to Emi, her face very close. “I was in there for _eight weeks_. Eight weeks strapped to a bed and pissing into a diaper. Eight weeks without sleep because of all the screaming. Eight weeks being force-fed, when they bothered to feed me at all. And if Dad hadn’t emptied his bank account and got me out, they were going to start giving me ECT just to stop me crying.” She shrugged, lowered herself back onto the edge of the bed. “So you’ll forgive me if your _concern_ doesn’t really fill me with hope and joy right now.”

Emi’s fingernails were digging like blades into her palms. She was fighting to keep control, from lashing out and physically striking Rin, and it was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.

“Yes,” she hissed. “It was me. I called them.”

“Mm. Progress.”

“And do you know why I called them? Because when I went round to your place to invite you to my _wedding_ , I found out that you hadn’t eaten for two weeks. You hadn’t drunk anything but cheap brandy in three days. You were wandering around your studio wearing nothing but a filthy dressing gown and when I tried to talk to you, you kicked me in the knee. You couldn’t _speak_ , Rin!” She was shaking now, voice cracking, eyes tearing. “You were _dying!_ ”

Rin was watching her steadily, her head tilted slightly down and away, but there was an uncertainty in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

“I’ve lost too many people,” Emi whispered. “My dad, that poor boy at school… I knew that if I didn’t do something, something horrible and cowardly like calling down the authorities on you, then I was going to lose you too.”

“You did anyway,” said Rin, very quietly.

Emi took a deep breath, and nodded. “Fine. _I_ lost you. But the rest of the world didn’t, so that’s okay.”

“Then it’s okay to hate you for it.”

“If that’s what you want, yes.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “Come on Lilly, let’s go.”

“Emi, please.” Lilly’s grip on her arm tightened slightly. “Not yet.”

Rin closed her eyes. “Lilly, it was nice seeing you again. But I think your friend has had a really good idea and you should probably run with it.”

“Very well.” Lilly dipped her head. “But please, before we go, will you tell me something? Have you received any unusual correspondence lately?”

“No.”

“I’m glad.” She sighed. “That’s a relief, Rin.”

“Unless you mean that death threat thing. Why, what do you mean by unusual?”

A sharp pain spiked up Emi’s arm; Lilly was suddenly holding onto her very tightly indeed. She resisted the urge to wince. “You want to run that past us again?”

Rin’s face was a study in disinterest. “Some newspaper clipping. About that man who got stabbed, which was horrible, and then it had been photocopied on a really crappy copier which made it look worse. I don’t know why.” She yawned. “Sort of grainy. Like those dream sequences in horror movies.”

Emi glanced across at Lilly. The other woman was tense, her face rigid.

“Was there anything else?” she asked.

“My face stuck on with glue. I mean, don’t people even know how to Photoshop?” Rin’s eyes opened, narrowed suspiciously. “Why? Did you send it?”

“Why the hell would I send you a death threat?” Emi scowled. “Before today, anyway.”

That earned her a sharp rap on the ankle from Lilly’s cane. She didn’t feel it, of course, but the sound of it made her start. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Rin,” said Lilly, “Emi and I have received very similar letters.”

“What, with my face on them?”

“No. They were, ah…” Lilly’s voice dropped lower. “Personalised.”

Rin sat forward, her eyes suddenly very wide. “That’s bad. That’s a worry. I’m worried now. Is someone going to shoot at you too?”

“We’ll be careful,” said Emi. “Lilly, we should-“

“No,” Lilly snapped. “Emi, what’s the matter with you? We’re not children, and this is more important than your foolish arguments. Tell Rin what happened.”

“Something happened?” Rin was on her feet in one smooth, fluid movement, off the bed and standing right in front of Emi again. “What? What happened to you?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Liar. Stop lying, you liar.” Rin was tilting her head this way and that. For a moment Emi thought it was some kind of nervous tic, or side effect from her injury, but then she realised that the woman was checking her for damage. “Tell me.”

She swallowed hard. “I… I think someone tried to run me over.”

Rin’s expression crumpled. In one instant all her coolness and disinterest were gone. She was shivering, her eyes wide, her skin white.

“No,” she whispered. “No no no no. Not you.”

“It’s okay, I’m all right. Just some bruises.”

“It’s not okay. How can you say it’s okay? What could possibly be okay about this?” Rin shook her head. “No. Not okay. Help me get my clothes back. We’re leaving.”


	6. The Space Between Words

If the trip to Niiza hospital had been quiet, the trip coming back was positively soundless. Emi drove with her hands painfully tight on the wheel, shaking with anger and distress. In the back seat, Rin was hunched into the corner, bruised face turned perpetually to the window, while Lilly sat next to her, bolt upright and eyes closed, as silent and unmoving as a statue.

Everyone in the car was, it seemed, utterly furious with everyone else.

It was Rin, finally, who broke the silence. “Left here.”

“What?” snapped Emi.

“Turn left here. I don’t want to go home.”

“Fine.” She slowed, headed towards the next junction. “Where do you want to go instead?”

“My parents’ place. Just drop me at the door, I’ve got keys.”

“I think we should at least see you inside,” said Lilly. “To make sure you’ll be safe.”

“But who’s going to make sure _you’re_ safe?”

In contrast to her earlier emotionless tirade, Rin’s voice sounded heartbreakingly small and frightened. Emi took a couple of long, deep breaths, felt her hands loosen slightly on the wheel.

“Rin,” she said, as calmly as she was able. “May Lilly and I come in with you? Just for a little while?”

There was a long silence. And then Rin whispered something that sounded a lot like “ _Yes please_.”

It was good enough for now.

 

Rin’s shirt had been too blood-stained to save. She was still wearing her hospital gown, over a pair of loose-fitting cargo trousers with half a dozen pockets on each leg. Emi waited at the front door of the Tezukas’ neat little house, watching Rin stand on one foot to retrieve a set of doorkeys from a pocket on the opposite ankle.

She reached down, took them from between her toes. “Let me.”

Rin didn’t resist her. Emi unlocked the door and pushed it warily open.

Beyond was a typical entranceway; a tiny table, a wall-hanging, several pairs of shoes lined neatly along one wall. Emi listened carefully, but heard nothing. Just the cool silence of an unoccupied home in winter.

She stepped through, taking her shoes off as she did so. “I think we’re okay.”

Rin moved past her, slipping off her sandals. Emi saw her line them up precisely next to what must have been her mother’s shoes, nudging them into place with one toe. _That’s new_.

“Lilly,” Rin said. “Have you been here before? I’m sorry, I can’t remember right now.”

“That’s quite all right, Rin. And no, I don’t believe I have.”

Emi had, a long time ago, but she could barely remember the layout. The years between school and now had never felt so long.

“Do you want me to show you around?”

“I’m sure I can find my way. Emi, why don’t you help Rin find some fresh clothes?”

There was an edge to her voice that hadn’t gone away since the hospital. Lilly was still angry at her. With good reason. “Is that okay, Rin?”

“There’s stuff in my old room,” Rin replied. “They keep it ready in case I ever… Well, you know. ”

“Sleep over?”

A tiny smile quirked at the corner of Rin’s lips. “Yes, that’s it. Lilly, are you going to be okay for a while?”

“More than okay, thank you. It’s time I made some phone calls.”

 

It wasn’t until she was halfway up the stairs that Emi realised how much pain she was in. Driving was putting her knees and thigh muscles under constant tension, and not being able to use her running legs meant that any normal strategy for managing that tension simply wasn’t available to her. That wasn’t even taking into account the residual aches and spasms from her near miss of the previous day: much to her shame, Emi found herself climbing the steps one at a time, and clinging onto the handrail like a pensioner.

Even Rin couldn’t fail to notice how slowly she was moving. “Wow. He really messed you up, didn’t he.”

“Who?”

“Whoever tried to run you over.”

“No.” They had reached the landing. “Well, a bit. I was lucky, I guess. I fell back, and he just took my right leg off as he drove past.”

“You’re limping on that one. Worse than the other one, anyway.” Rin’s bedroom was at the end of the landing. She opened the door with her knee and then moved aside to let Emi through. “Will you start resting up soon?”

“If I can.” Emi hesitated at the threshold. Going through didn’t feel right. “Look, Rin…”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Emi nodded, and went in.

Like everything in Rin’s new life, the room was sparse and very tidy. The bed was neatly made and covered with a dust sheet. There was a small nightstand, a cupboard and an empty bookshelf. That was all. No pictures, no art materials, no books or toys or ornaments.

The surfaces were clean, almost shining. Rin’s mother must have dusted here frequently.

Looking at the room made Emi feel desperately uncomfortable. How long had Rin spent here, staring at those blank walls, after she had returned from hospital? Had the room always been so bare, so cell-like?

Rin was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Shirts are in the wardrobe.”

“Okay.” Emi slid the door across and peered inside. “Hey, there’s a couple of your old school uniforms in here.”

“Just something I can get into by myself, please.”

Emi glanced back at her. “Rin, we’re not going unless you want us to. We won’t leave you on your own.”

“Hm. On that subject.”

She cringed, keeping her head in the wardrobe so Rin wouldn’t see. _Here it comes again._

“How come Lilly’s here, anyway? Shouldn’t she be nine thousand one hundred and thirteen kilometres away?”

_Oh_. “Please tell me you looked that number up.”

“Of course I did. When she left. I’d have to be an idiot savant to be able to work stuff like that out in my head, and I’m pretty sure I’m only one of those things.”

“That’s a relief.” Emi began sliding hangars around, trying to choose. “She’s been working for something called the Braithwaite Foundation. They run schools for blind and partially-sighted students, got little branches all over. They want to expand into Japan, so they sent her to start it up.” She hooked out a pale blue shirt. “How’s this?”

“It’s fine. So she’s their gateway to the Far East.”

“Pretty much. Do you want me to help you with…” She watched Rin shrugging her way out of the gown. “Okay, never mind.”

Rin gazed up at her expectantly, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that she was now wearing only a plain white bra on her top half. Emi lifted the shirt and put it over her head, then stepped back as Rin began to wriggle her way into it.

She couldn’t help looking more closely. Apart from a couple of bruises and abrasions on her right shoulder, Rin’s body was in better shape than Emi could ever remember seeing. At school she had often been pale and painfully thin, but now her skin had a healthy sheen, taut over smooth muscle.

Fully into the shirt now, Rin swung her feet up onto the bed and sat back against the wall. “Why are you smiling?”

“Am I?” She shrugged. “It’s just… Well, you look, you know. Okay.”

“Hm?”

“Like you’re eating properly.”

Rin’s expression changed. Suddenly she was looking guarded, wary. “I’m doing everything properly.”

Emi sat carefully on the edge of the bed, not too close. “What do you mean?”

“I eat properly, even when no-one tells me to.” Her voice was quiet, controlled. As though she wasn’t speaking, but reciting. “I keep my apartment clean and tidy. I don’t talk to people I don’t know. When I talk I keep my thoughts in order, list them one, two, three.” She looked away. “I’m always careful, every day.”

“I don’t understand. Rin, that doesn’t even sound like you.”

“That’s because I can’t be me anymore.” Her feet were rubbing together, very slightly, like a nervous tic. “Not out loud. Even when I’m on my own I have to be careful.”

That was when Emi understood. “Oh god.”

“My medical records have got _Mental Illness_ all over them now. Big red rubber stamp, every page. Probably. That’s what it looks like in my head, anyway.” Rin seemed to have noticed what her feet were doing. She was holding herself very still. “So if I make a fuss or ramble when I talk or start crying I could end up in the mountains again.”

“Rin, I’m-“

“Don’t say sorry.” Rin was smiling. “It’s okay.”

“What could possibly,” Emi grated, echoing Rin’s own words, “be okay about this?”

“It’s okay because it’s okay. Because _I’m_ okay.” Her eyes were drooping closed. “Also tired. Probably painkillers. Emi, listen… When I came back from the funny farm Dad got me a doctor, a good one. She tailed my meds off, got me back into my apartment. Looked in on me for a year until she was sure I was all right on my own. She was the one who helped me be careful.”

“It must be so scary, though. You know, being careful the whole time.”

 “It is, yes. But I don’t mind. Sometimes I like being careful. I smell better, for one thing.” Her eyes were fully shut now. “I am so, so angry at you for what you did. I don’t think I can ever stop being angry. But you were right to do it. You had to do it. If you hadn’t I’d be dead. I’m sleepy.”

“That’s okay,” Emi breathed. “You sleep. We’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Um. That’s kind of creepy but also nice.” And then Rin said something, slurred and whispered. Emi thought she’d heard it correctly, but that might have been wishful thinking. She couldn’t be sure.

All she could do was to reach out and stroke Rin’s untidy red-brown hair, very gently. And then, when the woman’s breathing had slowed into the steady, silent rhythm of sleep, she got up and stepped back onto the landing.

“I’ve missed you too,” she whispered, and closed the door behind her.


	7. Talking in the Dark

Emi could hear Lilly’s voice as she made her way down the stairs, quiet sentences and interjections broken by long silences. One half of a phone conversation.

Her voice was coming from the Tezukas’ kitchen. Emi opened the door and saw Lilly walking slowly alongside the counter, her phone tight against one ear, the fingertips of her free hand brushing the work surface as she moved. “Of course,” she was saying, her tone cool and controlled. “I understand, yes. Please let me know as soon as it’s done.”

“Hey,” Emi said hesitantly, just in case Lilly hadn’t heard her come in.

Lilly nodded curtly in her general direction, then her fingers found the end of the counter and she turned, smoothly swapping the phone into her other hand. She was pacing, Emi realised, easing herself down onto a nearby chair. Which meant that Lilly was still a lot more upset than she’d been letting on.

“No, perhaps we shouldn’t tell them that. It would… I agree. Yes…” Lilly gave a slight, reflexive bow. “Thank you again, Mister Isei. Goodbye.”

“Who was that?” Emi asked, as Lilly set the phone down.

“The superintendent of Rin’s block. I didn’t hear her come down, is she all right?”

“Yeah, she’s zonked out, that’s all.”

“We should check on her regularly.”

“I will, don’t worry. So what did this guy have to say?”

“Well, I was hoping he would be able to repair Rin’s door and window before she went home.” Lilly leaned back against the counter. “He says the police have asked him to hold off until they’ve finished.”

Emi raised an eyebrow. “They seemed pretty finished when we were there.”

“Mr Isei had been instructed to keep the apartment secure in case they needed to come back. It appears he was somewhat lax in that duty. However, given that you may have just contaminated an active crime scene, I decided not to press the matter too much.”

“Oops.”

“Of course, if he _had_ been there, he could have told us that Rin was alive and perhaps saved us a lot of needless heartache.” Lilly paused, then took a slow breath, as though readying herself for something she wasn’t particularly looking forward to. “Emi, when were you planning to tell me the truth?”

“What about? Oh yeah, the most shameful, repulsive thing I’ve ever done in my life. Let’s go with ‘never’.” She sat back, stretching her legs out under the table to try and ease the tension in her thighs. “I didn’t think I’d ever have to. In my head we were gonna make sure she was okay, she’d kick me out of the apartment and I could just go on trying to forget it had ever happened.”

“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t understand?”

“It wasn’t about you.” Emi glared at her. “Listen, Rin’s up there sleeping like a baby and she thinks I saved her. I didn’t save her, I couldn’t even spare the time to do that. I threw her over the fence and let someone else deal with her, and now it turns out that ‘someone else’ was a pack of fucking wolves. Even admitting that to _myself_ makes me want to throw up, so why the hell do you think I’d want to talk about it to anyone else?”

“Because you might have realised,” said Lilly in a very small voice, “how insulting it is to be lied to like this.”

“Oh please.” Emi rolled her eyes. “Come on, Lilly, since when I ever been that smart? I’m not the girl who faces up to her problems, I’m the one who starts running away from them and keeps running until she can’t see them for dust.”

“How eloquent.” Lilly felt along the countertop until she found her cane, and unfolded it. “Well, thank you for being honest with me about that, at least.”

There was no anger in her voice, not any more. Just a kind of weary disappointment, which was far worse. Emi drew her legs back and pushed herself upright. “Lilly…”

“I think it would be better if I called a cab.”

“It really wouldn’t.” Emi went over to her, and very carefully took the cane back out of her hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, for everything. I’m an idiot and an asshole, and after all this is over I’ll understand if you don’t ever want to talk to me again. But can we at least put that on hold until we’re not being chased by a psycho?”

Lilly gave a small, shivering sigh. “You’re right, of course. That was foolish of me.”

“No, it wasn’t. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me either right now.”

“Very well. For Rin’s sake we’ll say no more about this. Barring two important points.”

“Which are?”

“Firstly, if you ever take my cane from me again you’ll be on the ground looking up before you know it.”

“Oh hell,” She pressed the cane hurriedly back into Lilly’s hands. “Sorry.”

“And secondly, perhaps you should take a bath.”

“What?” Emi stepped back reflexively. “You’re saying I smell bad, now?”

“Not at all.” Lilly almost smiled. “But I can hear from your voice that you’re still in a lot of pain, and I think it would help.”

*****

While the idea of bathing at the Tezukas’ house embarrassed Emi to the point of outright horror, she had to admit that a good soak was probably the only thing that could save her leg muscles from seizing up entirely. And since there was no way she was going to leave Rin and Lilly to go back to her own place, there really wasn’t another sensible choice.

That didn’t stop her protesting for the next ten minutes, though.

Later, soaped and scrubbed and submerged in a tubful of clean hot water with a cloth on her head, Emi lay perfectly still and concentrated on the fading twinges in her thighs and back. The bath wasn’t quite as effective for muscle pain as sitting up to her middle in iced water, but it was close enough and, she had to admit, a lot more pleasant.

In fact, she realised with a guilty start, she was in actual danger of dozing off.

She scowled, sat up a little straighter. She didn’t want to be caught unawares if anything dreadful happened, like a hooded killer sneaking in or the Tezukas coming home early. Emi wasn’t entirely sure which of those two scenarios she feared more, but it was probably the latter. At least being murdered would save her having to avoid Rin’s parents for the rest of eternity.

And then she thought: _shit, Emi, that was dark. Even for a day like today, that was out of line_.

She gazed down at her own body, distorted and refracted by the water. For a very strange moment she almost didn’t recognize it as hers – as if the Emi she had been at school was looking down on Emi in her mid-twenties and not liking much of what she saw.

“So, Takada,” she murmured out loud. “What have you done today?” _Lounged around in someone’s bath without their permission. Walked all over a crime scene. Lied to a hospital worker. Alienated the one proper friend I’d been able to keep since I left Yamaku._ “Not a bad day’s work, for a total idiot.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Emi gave a startled yelp, jerked upright so quickly that she lost all purchase on the tub. She flailed wildly for a few seconds, flinging water in every direction, then managed to grab the edge of the bath and pull herself down behind it. “ _Rin?_ What the hell are you doing?”

“I asked first.” Rin was standing in the open doorway, looking vaguely around the room as if it contained at least twenty things more interesting than a naked, cowering woman kneeling in the bath.

“No-one. Just me. Go away.”

“That’s a bad habit. You shouldn’t do that too much. I used to, and look what happened to me. What were you talking to you about?”

“ _Nothing._ ”

“Also bad.”

Emi sighed, and eased back from the edge of the bath slightly. “I was just trying to remember when I became such a horrible person, that’s all.”

“Oh, okay. I can remember the date quite clearly, do you want me to tell you?”

“No. How are you feeling?”

“Hard to say. Kind of groggy and weird, but I don’t know if that’s new today or if I’ve always been groggy and weird and I’m only just starting to notice because people keep asking how I feel. I’m sure the splitting headache’s new, though.”

“They gave me some painkillers for you. Give me five minutes and I’ll find them. I’d better check your dressing too.”

“Okay.”

Several seconds went past. Rin didn’t move. Emi made an exasperated noise: “Rin, _please_ go away and let me get out of the bath.”

“Um. Right.” Rin turned back to the doorway, a tiny smile lighting her face. “Spoilsport.”

Emi balled up the cloth and hurled it her retreating back, but she missed.

 

Back in the kitchen and clad almost entirely in towels, Emi sat on a chair with her legs off and gently peeled the surgical tape from Rin’s forehead. “Tell me if this hurts, okay?”

“Why? If I do, will you stop?”

“No, I’ll just be more gentle.”

“So you’re not already being as gentle as you can. That’s a worry.”

“I’m going to poke you right in the eye.” Emi hid a grin. Despite Rin’s deadpan tones she could tell the woman was teasing her. “Maybe that will take your mind off how gentle I’m not being.”

“Now now, children,” said Lilly from across the kitchen. “Play nice.”

“Aw mom, she started it.” Emi stripped back the last of the tape, then looked closely at what lay beneath.

 _Damn,_ she thought.

For some reason she had been expecting a small, neat cut, but with the dressing off it was clear that she’d been naïve. Rin might have escaped serious injury, but she had still been shot – a piece of lead had skimmed its way across the bone of her skull, hard enough to knock her senseless, and the ragged tear it had left in the tissue above made Emi wince in sympathetic pain.

Higuchi had stitched the wound as neatly as he was able, but Rin was going to have a nasty scar there. Luckily her hairstyle would cover most of it. “Okay, it’s clean. Tiny bit of bleeding, but nothing to worry about.”

“That’s good news.” Lilly leaned down to set a tray on the table. Emi glanced at it, saw tea, sandwiches, small cakes.

“Seriously? You want to eat now?”

“Perhaps you’re not hungry, Emi, but Rin and I are.”

Emi dabbed at Rin’s wound with a cotton pad. “Of course I’m hungry. I’m always hungry. I just didn’t think we’d have time.”

“Before what?” Rin asked quietly.

“Going to the police.” She stripped the wrapper from a new dressing, then brushed the hair away from Rin’s forehead. “Hold still, this might hurt a bit.”

“Didn’t you already talk, ow, to them?”

“After the car thing, sure. But that was before I knew about Lilly’s letter or yours or somebody trying to shoot you.” She pressed the dressing down, neatly covering the wound. “There you go.”

“Thank you.” Rin looked away, as if unable to meet Emi’s gaze. “I don’t think I want to do that.”

Lilly slid a chair back and sat down, her hands finding the tray, the teacups. “Rin, I’m afraid we don’t have a choice. Failing to tell the police what we know about your incident would be withholding evidence. Besides, there is every chance we are still in danger.”

“It won’t take long,” Emi told her. “We’ll be back here before you know it.”

Rin closed her eyes for a moment, her lips moving. Distressingly, Emi could see her mouthing words. _List them. One, two, three._

“I don’t want to go to the police because I’ve already spoken to them and it was scary and if I go back they might tell Mr Isei that I went crazy that one time and I don’t want to lose my apartment.” The jumble of words had emptied Rin’s lungs. She took a fast, almost panicked breath. “I like my apartment. I don’t want to have to move again, but if anyone finds out I was in the mountains I might have to.”

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Lilly.

“How?”

“I’ll think of something,” Emi replied. “Rin, please. You can’t go home until they catch him. What if he comes back to finish the job?”

“Maybe he won’t. He hasn’t even got a gun any more. It broke.”

“So next time he uses a knife. Or a brick. Or he puts a plastic bag over your head.” Emi saw Rin’s eyes widen slightly. “ _Shit_. Rin, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

 _What is wrong with you?_ Lilly mouthed silently.

“I don’t like this,” said Rin, looking glum. “I haven’t had friends for ages and suddenly I’ve got two and they’re both talking at me and now my head hurts.” She sighed. “Okay, but I reserve the right to remain silent. Can we at least finish our tea?”

“Sure.” Emi picked up a tiny cake and held it in front of Rin’s mouth. “Open.”

The woman blinked. “You don’t have to feed me.”

Emi kept the cake exactly where it was. “I know.”

“Hm.” Rin smiled, blushed very slightly. “Maybe this friends thing has an upside after all.”


	8. Two Divided by Zero

There were many things Rin Tezuka did not like about Assistant Police Inspector Namba.

She didn’t like the way he wore his tie, for example; there was something eerie about the way it was simultaneously loose and lopsided and yet pulled very tight around his collar. It made her think of a noose, or a Mobius Strip, an endless strangulation with only one side. She didn’t like the way his eyebrows were unkempt, with little grey-black hairs hanging randomly down over his eyes. They looked like wiry caterpillars. If he couldn’t look after his eyebrows, she reasoned, how could she trust him to look after Emi and Lilly? She was annoyed by the way he repeated things that people said to him, as though he couldn’t quite believe they had said them and he was trying the words out for himself to see if they worked better coming out of his mouth. He also wore very bad aftershave.

But what she disliked most about Namba was the way he looked at her.

Rin knew she wasn’t beautiful like Lilly or cute like Emi. She knew that her hair was scruffy and her eyes tended to half-close of their own accord and her mouth was too small and didn’t move much when she spoke. She knew, with a clarity that most people probably wouldn’t have given her credit for, that her lack of arms and the subsequent narrowness of her upper torso made some people uncomfortable.

There were people who had a problem looking at people who weren’t the shape people usually are; that was sad, but it was the way of things, and she had learned to ignore it.

Namba, though, pitied her, and that just hurt.

It was on his face like a rash, like acne. _That poor girl, why is she alive? Why would she want to be alive? How could she possibly live on her own? Someone should take care of her. Look after her. Put her somewhere safe where she can’t fall over and hurt herself._

He had looked at her that way when she was waking up in Niiza hospital, and he was doing it again now. Rin was sitting between Lilly and Emi, three hard plastic chairs lined up on one side of a desk in the interview room, and even though Emi was talking to him his eyes kept flicking away from her and back to Rin. To her shoulders and the empty spaces where her arms should be.

Emi had been telling him about how she had almost been killed by a green car. Now she was telling him about Rin, and how she had almost been killed by a bullet.

Two pieces of metal travelling at high speed, Rin pondered, glad to have something to think about other than Namba’s spooky tie or eyebrows or pity. Two near-misses. Two places where the universe divides. There was a certain fearful symmetry to that, like entangled particles; their spins shared, intertwined, reflecting one another all the way across Tokyo.

Decision points. Fractures. Moments when the path of events splits to race off in two entirely separate directions; causes changed, effects remodelled. In one branch a phone rings, and Rin turns to it, angry confused hopeful afraid and a fat rifle bullet punches through glass, through canvass, caroms across the white bone of her skull and embeds itself in the doorframe. Her apartment whirls away into sick slick darkness and becomes a hospital ceiling, doctors peering down at her as if she were an insect pinned to a board.

Travel down the other branch and the phone does not ring, or rings a second later, or Rin keeps her concentration and ignores it. The bullet erupts through her head, sending her thoughts and dreams and feelings splashing across the apartment floor, pale grey and wet dark crimson.

 _Am I here_ , she wondered, _in that other universe? Is Emi lying beside me?_

She imagined herself somewhere in the great grey guts of the police station, naked and bagged with her skull a broken, emptied eggshell. Emi, too, flattened and twisted with her smooth golden skin criss-crossed with tyre tracks. Not people anymore, just vaguely people-shaped spaces filled with crushed meat and splintered bone.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine. She already had a pretty good idea of what it would look like.

Another decision point, another knife-sharp divide in the waveform of her life. Six years ago, Yamaku, the day of the festival. Rin walks with Shiina Mikado back from the art room - Misha had needed something from the supply cupboard and wanted help finding it. They round a corner and see a cluster of students, hear whispering, weeping, someone being noisily sick and they push their way to the front just as two teachers are covering Hisao Nakai’s body with a sheet.

His head wasn’t really a head any more.

Entropy. Causality. In every universe events move through time to a state of inevitable chaos. Misha was never quite the same after that; every day her loud annoying laugh had been a little more false, a little more hollow, until one day she stopped laughing altogether. Rin had never really liked Misha, never found her interesting and her voice was like having someone clapping their hands right next to her ear, but she missed that laugh.

Thinking about it made her stomach ache. _I hope she’s okay,_ she found herself thinking. _I hope she’s happy, somewhere. I hope she didn’t get a-_

“-letter, Miss Tezuka?”

She blinked.  Namba was looking at her expectantly.

 _Order your thoughts, Rin. List them one, two, three_. “I threw it away. I’m very sorry. It was creepy and I didn’t think it was important.”

Next to her, Emi raised a hand and laughed nervously. “Ah, same answer.”

“Not important. Right.” Namba was holding Lilly’s letter up to the light. It was already covered in a clear plastic folder, to preserve any fingerprints that might be on it, daubs and dabs and DNA, the tiny twinkling traces of himself that the sender would have left if he was really stupid and wouldn’t if he wasn’t. “We’ll get this tested right away. Miss Satou, I’ll have to ask you to provide fingerprints for elimination. And your secretary.”

“Of course.” Lilly was sitting to Rin’s left, directly opposite a more junior policeman who was writing everything down. It was plain that the scratching of the man’s pen irritated her. “Does she need to come here for that?”

“Come here? No, just her nearest station. They can send them across.”

“Thank you.”

There was a sudden, sharp rapping sound, bone on wood. Rin lowered her head, trying to hide under her own hair. She had a slight phobia about policemen, although she’d gotten very good at concealing it. She was always worried that one would knock her down and sit on her and break her ribs again.

Namba got up and opened the door, Lilly’s letter in his hand. He passed it to whoever was outside, whispering something as he did so.

Rin didn’t hear what it was, but she felt Lilly stiffen beside her.

“Okay, I think that’s everything.” Namba held the door open wider. “Thank you all very much for your co-operation.”

“That’s it? Seriously?” Emi pushed herself upright.

“Seriously. Unless you can think of something else you’d like to tell me.”

“No,” said Lilly, quite coldly. “I believe that’s all we have for you. Thank you for listening to us, Assistant Inspector.”

“Not at all.”

Rin stood up, moving very carefully so as to draw as little attention to herself as possible. “Thank you we’ll go now.”

“Wait,” said Emi.

“Please let’s not.”

“But what are we supposed to do?”

“Do? Go home,” said Namba. “And try not to worry. Just make sure your doors and windows are locked.”

Rin considered telling Namba that her window had been locked when a bullet had come through it, but decided not to. She just wanted to be away.

 

She sat in the front passenger seat as Emi drove them away from the police station, her head turned to the window. It was raining, quite hard, and the droplets coursing across the glass turned the streetlamps into a procession of golden glowing spiderwebs. Rin watched them slide past, one after another after another, merging and sprawling. She tried to fix them in her memory, but it was impossible. She still didn’t feel well, her head throbbing and muzzy with painkillers. Besides, she couldn’t think about painting right now. There were too many other things on her mind.

The most pressing of which was the unnerving feeling that Lilly and Emi didn’t like each other anymore.

She had noticed it ever since she had woken up in her room and found Emi in the bath. It was a nervousness between them, an invisible barrier, like the push of two opposing magnets. Whenever Emi would take Lilly’s arm to guide her she would hesitate, as if unsure what would happen if she did. When they touched, Lilly would flinch. And whenever they spoke to each other there was an edge to what they said and how they said it; a brittleness, their words as sharp and fragile as glass.

 _They used to be friends,_ Rin thought miserably. Not really good friends – Lilly had spent most of her time with Hanako, until that day in the school cafeteria, and Emi with Rin – but close enough for Lilly to meet Emi as soon as she returned to Japan years later. Now Lilly was hunched into the far corner of the Toyota, looking as if she was trying to get as far from Emi as she could.

A state change had occurred, a destabilising factor introduced into the geometry of their relationship. A new pigment mixed into the bright blue and gold shades of them, shifting them around the colour wheel, rendering them discordant. They clashed, now.

Rin knew exactly what that colour was, but she wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it. _You can’t unmix paint. You have to wash the palette off and start all over again._

“Did either of you hear what he said?” Lilly was saying. “After that knock on the door.”

“Who, Namba?” Emi didn’t look round. She drove with a strange determination, Rin had noticed, hunched slightly forward, glaring at the road with her hands tight on the wheel. “Something about sending it somewhere.”

“Almost. He said ‘Put this with the others, get them over to Yagi.’”

“Them?”

“Exactly.”

Emi frowned. “So where’s Yagi?”

“He’s not a where, he’s a who.” Rin told her. “Another policeman. He was on TV talking about that boy who got stabbed and our faces stuck on him.”

“Ah,” said Lilly. “Of course, thank you Rin. I believe he’s heading up the Kodai case.”

“Well, at least somebody’s taking us seriously,” Emi replied.

Emi’s face when she drove was rather like her face when she ran, and Rin hadn’t seen that for a long time. “I hope he’s a better policeman than Assistant Inspector Namba.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t like him. When he talked to me in hospital he thought that if I fell over I’d not be able to get up again. He doesn’t care where the photographs came from. He didn’t ask anyone to take prints of my toes. Maybe he’s not even a real policeman.”

“I’m sorry, Rin,” said Lilly. “But what do you mean by photographs?”

“Pictures you make with a camera.”

Lilly made a very quiet sound that was midway between a sigh and a growl. “For your next trick, perhaps you’d like to define the word _context_.”

That was a puzzling thing to say. “Not really.”

“Rin,” said Emi. “Which photographs were you talking about?”

“The ones somebody used to make those death threats we got sent. I mean, _we_ know they came from our high school yearbook, but there’s no way he could-“

The car swerved wildly. Rin stuck her legs out to brace herself, but she couldn’t stop her head from connecting painfully with the car window.

She heard Lilly yelp Emi’s name, the blare of a car horn from somewhere behind. Panic surged up into her throat. “Are you okay? Emi? Are you having a seizure? Did you see a dog?”

The Toyota was pulling sideways, fast, sliding into a parking space by the side of the road.Emi braked, harder than she needed to, twisted in her seat to glare at Rin. _“What do you mean they came from our yearbook?”_

Tiny specks of light were whirling Rin’s vision. “Where else would they have come from? What about the dog, is it okay?”

Emi closed her eyes, began to tap her forehead against the steering wheel. “ _There. Is. No. Dog._ How long have you known about the photographs?”

“Since I saw Lilly’s. It was a yearbook photo like mine.”

“And when were you planning to let us in your little secret?” hissed Lilly.

Rin was looking wildly from Emi to Lily and back again. “I… I thought you already-“

Lilly’s hand slammed against the back of the seat. “How could I _possibly_ have known?” she snarled.

“Don’t yell at her!” Emi was fully around in her seat now. “Who the hell gave you the right to talk to her like that?”

Rin bounced up in her seat, hit the seatbelt release with her heel, the door handle with her knee. She swung herself out of the car and bolted into the rain.

She ran across the sidewalk. The car had pulled up on a small shopping street; a jagged grid of TVs loomed in front of her, a confusing sprawl of colours and moving forms. She stumbled to a halt, reflected images dancing around her feet, a thousand raindrops hitting and bouncing and flying up, circles and ripples and endless endless detail.

She shut her eyes tightly. A sob ripped its way out of her.

Behind her, the thudding of car doors. “Rin, wait!”

She turned around. Emi was running towards her, Lilly striding quickly along in her path, cane out and tapping at the wet concrete. “Leave me alone.”

“You know I’m not going to do that.” Emi stopped in front of her. “Rin, it’s pouring. Please come back.”

“I can’t!” She wanted to be quiet, to be careful. There were other people on the street and they were already staring, but she couldn’t keep the words in. They bubbled out of her like vomit. “I hate this! You’re shouting at each other and I know it’s my fault and I don’t know why!”

“Oh Rin…” Lilly was at Emi’s side. “We promise not to shout anymore.”

“It’s not that. I’m scared!” There was water on her face. Was she crying, or was it just rain? She couldn’t tell. ”I’ve only just found you and now I’m going to lose you again!”

“You’re not going to lose us!” Emi’s green eyes were huge with distress. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I’m the one that’s making you hate each other.”

“Oh God, no.” Emi shook her head. “It’s not… It’s not your fault, not at all. It’s mine.”

“It is _ours_.” Lilly put her hand on Emi’s arm. “Rin, you are blameless in this. Please don’t think you have done anything wrong.” She sighed. “I was angry at Emi because she lied to me about what happened to you. And I have taken that out on you both. That was unforgivable of me, and I am sorry.”

“Me too.” Emi sniffed noisily. “God, we’re a bunch of lost causes, aren’t we.”

“People are looking at us,” whispered Rin.

“Yeah, ‘cause we’re gorgeous.” Emi gave her a small, sad smile, then put out a hand to touch Rin’s side. “Come on, let’s go home.”

“No,” said Lilly.

“No?”

“No.” Lilly’s face was set hard. “The more I discover about this business, the less happy I am to sit at home with the doors and windows locked and wait for something to happen. Especially with someone like Namba in charge.”

“He had horrible eyebrows,” said Rin. Lilly wouldn’t have known that. It was important that she did. “And his tie was freaking me out.”

“All the more reason.” She smiled grimly. “Emi, can you find us an internet café? I need to call someone.”

“Who?”

“Someone I- No, someone _we_ can trust.”


	9. Risk Management

A quick check on Emi’s phone revealed three internet cafés within walking distance, although Rin vetoed one immediately. “Not KomiKoffee. I went there once and now I’m not allowed to go back.”

“You got banned from an internet café?” Emi tugged her hair out from under her scarf, smoothed it down. She had gone back to the car to retrieve their coats, and the three of them had moved under a nearby awning to put them on. “Should I even ask?”

“Um. Turns out you _can_ play computer games with your feet, but people don’t like it.” Rin was watching raindrops hit the sidewalk. “Especially if you’re winning.”

Emi pulled up the collar of Rin’s leather jacket and adjusted her hat. She’d found them in the wardrobe. “Never figured you for a gamer.”

“I’m not. But I do commission work for games, so I thought I’d try it to see what it was like.”

“Was it fun?”

“Not as much fun as some of the other things I’ve tried to see what they were like.”

She grinned. “Ooh. You need to tell me about those.”

“I really shouldn’t.” Rin smiled back at her from under her hat brim, one of those small, sly smiles that took up almost no real estate on her face, but still managed to light her up like a bulb. “You’d be shocked. Scandalised. Jealous. Possibly all three.”

“Okay, now you’ve definitely got to tell me.”

“When you two have _quite_ finished flirting,” said Lilly, not unkindly, “we should set off soon. I’d like to catch Shizune before she leaves her office.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Emi opened her umbrella, then put her other arm next to Lilly’s. The woman took it without hesitation, walked with her out from under the awning. “You’re sure she’s gonna be okay with this?”

“Absolutely.” Lilly nodded firmly. “Right now I can think of no-one better suited to help us.”

“It’s so weird hearing you say that. Because I kind of remember you two, well… Not sure how to put this…”

“Hating each other’s guts?” Lilly smiled ruefully. “Yes, there was that. However, you might also remember that we were teenagers then. Adolescence is a strange time, in many ways.”

“Actually, I’m finding adulthood pretty messed up as well. When did you get back in touch with her?”

“About eighteen months ago, initially through work. Her department handles disability discrimination cases, something that the Foundation has to deal with all too often.” Lilly tipped her head back slightly, as if listening to rain hitting the umbrella, traffic hissing past. “We’ve worked closely together a number of times since the Japan branch was mooted, or at least as closely as our circumstances allow.”

“Her department?” Rin wasn’t under the umbrella – there wasn’t room – but her hat was wide enough to keep the rain off. “She owns a whole department?”

“Not quite. Or at least, _not yet_. Shizune is a senior legal secretary. However, she’s training to be an Attorney. Well on her way to qualifying, too.”

“Wow. Does she sleep, ever?”

“Only grudgingly, as I recall.”

Emi chuckled. “Shizune Hakamichi, Ace Attorney. Why am I not surprised?”

 

Had she been anywhere near central Tokyo, Emi would have worried about finding an internet café that hadn’t been subdivided into an endless warren of dingy cubicles. From what she had seen on TV, almost none of the old style facilities had survived there. The explosion in personal, portable computing had finished most of them off; those that remained now catered exclusively to a growing need for cheap, slightly desperate overnight accommodation.

Emi didn’t want to breathe stale cigarette smoke all night, and certainly not in a fibreboard box smaller than the Tezukas’ bathtub. Thankfully, Niiza was far enough from the city to still boast a few independent cafes. Behind its gaudily stickered windows and garish neon, Hi-Score CyMedia had remained reasonably traditional, with a dozen high-end PCs dotted around what looked like the interior of a pleasant little coffee shop.

Lilly had paid for an hour’s computer time, passing over a matte, Braille-embossed credit card with the Braithwaite Foundation logo on it. When the cashier put it through the till something had appeared on his screen that made his eyes go very round behind his spectacles. Emi couldn’t see what it was, but within moments she was with Rin and Lilly at the biggest desk in CyMedia, sitting in front of a monitor that was larger than her TV at home.

Emi was no computer expert, but under Lilly’s instruction she soon had a video call queued and a message window ready to connect to Matsushima Legal. “Is this how you normally do it?”

“At the Foundation we use bespoke software, but there are workarounds for when we’re out and about. How good is your typing?”

“Hunt and peck, sorry.”

“In which case, I’ll transcribe what’s needed, and you read.” Lilly frowned uncomfortably. “Emi, before we begin… When we are speaking with Shizune, it might be best if you don’t mention Shiina Mikado.”

“Misha? Why, what’s happened?”

“I wish I knew. All I can tell you is that they have not spoken in a long time, and that Shizune finds the matter painful to talk about.”

“Shit.” Emi sagged a little. “Seriously, did _anyone_ stay friends after we graduated?”

“We did,” said Rin, in a small voice. “Didn’t we?”

“Well,” Emi mumbled, suddenly finding the surface of the desk rather interesting. “I mean yeah, but-“

“Just because I hated you all that time doesn’t mean we weren’t friends, does it?”

She sniffed. “Rin, stop it. Or I’m gonna have to hug you really hard right here and people will look at us funny.”

Rin stuck her tongue out. “Funnier than usual.”

“In all honesty,” said Lilly, “even an average high school can be something of a bubble. Friendships made there seldom survive contact with the real world. And given how tense and fragile things were at Yamaku towards the end, I think we three are the exception, rather than the rule.”

“Yeah, but Shizune and Misha? Out of everybody, I thought those two…”

“Sadly not. And Shizune blames herself. Once she confessed that she still wonders what she did to drive Misha away, just as she was beginning to appreciate her in a way she hadn’t before.” Lilly sighed wistfully. “She was rather drunk, though.”

Emi tried to imagine Lilly Satou engaged in long-distance boozing sessions with Shizune, and failed. That would require Rin-level leaps of mental imagery. “Okay, so Misha’s off-limits. Shall I tell it to dial?”

“Already done.”

“What, now? Thanks for the warning, Lilly.” Emi edged away from the screen, suddenly aware that her palms were damp.

Lilly was very still, her long fingers spread lightly over the keyboard. “Is something wrong?”

“Nah. Just feeling like I’m gonna get told off, that’s all.”

Looking back, her reaction wasn’t all that surprising. She had never really gotten on with the Student Council, to say the least: Shizune had always been too competitive for her liking, controlling and abrasive and perpetually accompanied by the infuriating Shiina Mikado. There had been some public, and occasionally quite vicious spats between them and Lilly Satou, which Emi had taken very personally, not to mention the all times Shizune had scolded Rin for what seemed like trivial infringements of class rules.

Emi had usually just tried to stay out of their way. Despite that, the thought of the Council falling out disturbed her far more than she would have expected. It was clear to everyone who knew them that Misha had been Shizune’s only real friend. With her gone, Shizune would have had no-one at all to talk to.

No-one she _could_ talk to. Emi shivered, watching connection icons flash on the monitor.  _She must have been so lonely._

The computer chimed, a weirdly cheerful sound, and the video window lit up. Emi found herself looking onto a bright, open plan office, with what appeared to be a panoramic view of Tokyo visible from a broad strip of windows beyond.

Between her and the city sat a compact young woman, impeccably dressed in a plain dark suit and red blouse, her short, neat hair so black it was almost blue. For a second or two Emi didn’t recognise her – the open, delighted smile that had appeared on the woman’s face didn’t match the memory of her at all – but then she reached up to adjust her glasses and everything fell into place.

“Shizune’s there,” Emi smiled. “Damn, she looks good.”

A sentence appeared in the message window. _Why thank you!_

Emi blinked in surprise. Had Lilly typed something without her noticing?

“Hello Shizune,” said Lilly, quietly, but more slowly and carefully than sounded entirely natural. “As you can see, I’ve brought friends.”

 _Of course,_ Emi thought. She grinned and waved at the screen. “So you can read lips now.”

Shizune nodded. Emi heard a light rattling of keys through the PC’s speakers, saw words spooling out into the message window. “Something I should have done years ago,” she read aloud, “but I was too stubborn. Stupid, don’t you think? The world doesn’t sign and I have to keep up. Still learning, though, so please face the camera and speak clearly.” She nodded. “Okay, I can do that.”

Lilly smiled. “I’m very sorry to call you unannounced, Shizune. I know you must be busy.”

“Ah, Shizune says not at all, it’s always a pleasure. And seeing these two reprobates with you has made my day. Heh, that’s nice.” Emi felt Lilly tap her arm. “Oh, sorry. I mean… But I’m guessing this isn’t entirely a social call?”

Being Shizune’s voice was harder than it looked, Emi decided. The woman wrote clearly and concisely, of course – a direct result of sign language being her primary means of communication – but to read out the bald text of her words in such a way as to make sense to Lilly, and not add any commentary of her own… She was going to have to concentrate very hard.

No wonder Misha always looked so overworked.

“I’m afraid not,” Lilly replied. “We need your expertise.”

“Would you like me to get one of the singers?” Emi squinted. “Signers! I guess she means like, ah, you-know-who…”

Lilly shook her head firmly. “May we keep this between ourselves for the moment?”

“Of course,” Emi read. She noticed Shizune frowning, peering more closely at the screen, a sharply analytical expression on her face. “Rin, what happened to your head?”

“Not out loud, please Rin,” said Lily quickly, and then typed: _She was shot. At her apartment this morning._

Shizun’s eyes widened. “There was a news report. Woman injured in a firearms accident.” Emi kept her voice low and level. “So that was you. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine thank you.” Rin’s voice was barely more than a whisper. Emi glanced across and saw that she was keeping very still, her head slightly down, eyes fixed on a point a few centimetres above the desktop.

Her feet were rubbing nervously together.

Shizune had noticed her reaction too, at least from the desktop upwards. She smiled reassuringly, an expression so warm and gentle that it almost made her look like someone else entirely. “Rin, I know you were ill for a short time. You have nothing to fear from me.” Emi swallowed hard, then reached around behind Lilly to touch Rin’s shoulder. “It’s okay, you don’t have to be careful with Shizune. She knows you’re all better now.”

She heard typing. “Mental health rights are something else we fight for. But please have Lilly type your words. You’re a little hard to read.”

“Yeah,” said Rin. “I get that a lot.”

“So the police are still treating this as an accident?” Lilly’s fingers fluttered across the keyboard. _We believe otherwise._

“I suspected you might.” Shizune reached out of shot, came back with a leather-bound legal pad in one hand.

“All right. Tell me everything.”


	10. Still Small Voice

Over the next few minutes Lilly typed the whole story to Shizune; from receiving the death threats, to the attacks on Emi and Rin, to the origin of the photographs. At her end of the line, Shizune sat and took copious notes, writing on the legal pad with her right hand and occasionally tapping out questions with her left. _Did the car have any damage to the bodywork? Any word on the make of the rifle? Did the man who spoke to Emi’s mother have a definable accent?_

Finally she sat back, fingers tented and tapping one another in sequence. She remained like that for maybe half a minute, until Emi began to imagine what she’d look like with a white Persian cat on her lap. Then she moved to the keyboard again. “You’ll not be surprised to learn I received one of these letters too. _”_

“Son of a bitch really gets around,” said Emi. “What did you do with it?”

 _“_ Passed it to the police with the rest of the week’s hate mail _.”_ Shizune must have seen Lilly’s expression when Emi read that out. She smiled grimly. “Occupational hazard. There are people who don’t like what I do. Websearch disability hate crime if you really want to depress yourself _._ ”

“A man in the park tried to push me over,” said Rin.

“What?” Emi scowled. “Aw, Rin…”

“I asked him to stop. I said please stop trying to push me over, but he wouldn’t. I tried to walk away but he kept following me.” Rin shrugged. “So I kicked him in the balls.”

Emi covered her mouth, heard Lilly’s fingers stumble fractionally on the keyboard. Rin could kick like a mule when she was eighteen and underfed. In her twenties and looking after herself… _Damn, they must have ended up in his throat._ “Ah, Shizune refuses to legally condone an act of physical violence. Although she is giggling and don’t type that Lilly.”

“Thank you, Rin.” Emi saw Shizune take a deep breath, supressing her silent laughter, then square her shoulders. “Anyway, moving on… You have all done the right thing in coming to me with this. Some police departments have an aversion to evidence that might complicate an existing investigation. They will let everything that has happened remain a footnote unless we make ourselves heard.” A tiny smile quirked briefly at her lips. “If you know what I mean.”

“Namba was sending the letters over to Inspector Yagi,” said Lilly. “Do you think they might be ignored?”

“It is possible. However, I have contacts in Yagi’s department, some of whom owe me favours. Leave this with me.“

“Thank you so much, Shizune,” Lilly replied. “I can only apologise for burdening you with our troubles.”

“It’s the least I can do. Besides, if these incidents are as connected as we fear, then I’m in danger too.” The stream of characters ceased. Emi looked up to see Shizune sitting with a strange, pensive expression on her face, her hands rubbing together absently.

“Would you please do one thing for me?”

“Anything,” said Lilly.

“Check on…” Emi faltered, suddenly unsure of her ability to read. “Check on Misha. She won’t answer my calls, but I need to know she is all right.” She looked up at Shizune. “Of course, I’ll do that right now. Have you got her number?”

A series of digits appeared in the window. Emi tapped them into her phone, got up and walked to an unoccupied corner of the café while the dial tones sounded.

Within a few seconds, a soft click. “ _Hello?_ ”

Emi nibbled her lower lip. The reply wasn’t at all what she was expecting; a girl’s voice, quiet and controlled, almost nervous. Maybe she’d misdialled. “Hi... Is Misha there?”

There was a faint sound on the other end of the line, as if the girl had started to speak, but had cut herself off immediately. “ _I- I-_ _I’m sorry, could I ask who’s speaking, please?_ ”

“My name’s Emi Takada. Oh, but it was Ibarazaki when she knew me.”

“ _Emi!_ ”

She cringed slightly away from the phone. The rise in volume had been startling. “Hey Misha.”

“ _I’m so sorry…_ ” Suddenly the voice was so quiet she could barely hear it. “ _Aw, now everyone’s looking at me. I shouldn’t really take personal calls at work, Emi-chan.”_

“Oops. Sorry. Not getting you into trouble, am I?”

 _“I don’t care, it’s just so good to hear from you…_ _I watched you on TV, at the Asian Para Games last year, I pointed you out to everyone!_ ”

Emi blinked in surprise. “You did?”

“ _Of course I did! Your second gold medal, I was so happy for you!_ ”

“Thanks so much!” Emi couldn’t remember the last time anyone had sounded this pleased to talk to her. She turned back to the monitor, gave Rin a wink and a victory sign. “It’s good to hear you too. I’ve got to apologise, I didn’t recognise your voice at first, there.”

“ _It’s okay._ _Sorry for getting so confused, but no-one’s called me Misha for years. How are you? Are you doing okay?_ ”

“I’m fine. Look, Mish- Sorry, Shiina… I shouldn’t stay on long, we’ll catch up properly real soon, I promise. But I need to know if everything’s all right with you.”

“ _How do you mean?_ ”

“Well… Some of us, you know, who were at Yamaku? We’ve been getting things through the post in the past few days. Hate mail, really mean stuff.” She decided against mentioning the attacks for now, mainly for the sake of her eardrums. “I got one, Rin did, Lilly…”

“ _Oh, that sounds horrible. I don’t think I got anything like that, though. No, no-one’s been mean to me, Emi-chan_.”

“Nothing cut out of newspapers, anything like that?”

“ _Nope!_ ”

Emi couldn’t help grinning. “Shiina, that’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time. Listen, I know you’re at work. But I’ll call you back in the next couple of days, yeah?”

“ _Sure, I’d love that!_ ” Then Shiina’s voice became even quieter. “ _Hey, Emi?_ ”

“Hm?”

“ _Do you know, um…_ _Has someone sent mean things to Shicchan?_ ”

That was unexpected. For a moment Emi floundered, wondering what to say, but then decided that the truth was probably best. “Yeah. Yeah, they have.”

“ _Oh no.”_ There was a long pause. _“She’s okay, though, right?_ ”

“I think so.”

Another pause.Then: “ _Thank you for telling me, Emi. Please look after her_.”

The line went dead.

“Er, bye?” said Emi.

She took the phone from her ear and stared at it, completely perplexed. Despite what Lilly had said, there was plainly still something between Shizune and Misha. Each cared enough about the other to ask about her welfare, unprompted, even though it sounded like there had been no contact between them in years.

Then she saw her own face, reflected in the black glass mirror of the phone. _Back off, Takada,_ she told herself. _Try getting your own issues untangled before you go blundering into anyone else’s._

She went back to the desk and sat down. “She’s fine,” she told Shizune. “No-one sent her anything. She-“

Shizune held up a hand, then stood up and quickly walked out of shot.

“Oh.” Emi touched Lilly’s arm. “Shizune’s just taking a moment.”

“I understand.” Lilly put her fingers over Emi’s and squeezed her hand. “Thank you, Emi. That was a kind thing to do.”

“No, I wanted to.” Emi knew what it felt like to have her calls go unanswered. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

“So how did Misha sound?”

“It’s just Shiina now, I think. And, um, she sounds okay. Happy. Quiet, though.” She chuckled. “Can you imagine a quiet Misha?”

Lilly’s eyebrows went high. “I don’t think I can, no.”

Shizune was sitting back down. “Thank you, Emi. I appreciate that a great deal.”

“No problem. So what do we do now? Do you want us to stay here?”

“Our first proper reunion should not be held in an internet café.” Shizune appeared to ponder this for a few moments, then snapped her fingers so loudly that the computer speakers crackled. “There's a restaurant bar in Roppongi, Accelerando on Hillside. Can you get there in two hours?”

Emi made a swift mental calculation. Even if she hit roadworks or rush-hour traffic, two hours was easily long enough. “Sure. Roppongi Hills, though? That’s high-end, what if we can’t get in?”

“I’ll make reservations.” Shizune grinned wickedly. “My treat. We can write it off as a legal consultation, don’t you think?”


	11. Uncertainty Principle

From the outside Accelerando looked small, almost unassuming; a narrow frontage of white marble and tinted glass just off Keyakizaka Street. Even its signage was low-key, looping English characters embossed into plain slate. If Rin hadn’t spotted it Emi would probably have walked straight past.

“Nice work,” Emi told her, pushing the door open. “Saves me having to ask for directions. I don’t think I pronounce this place very well.”

“ _Accelerando_ ,” said Lilly perfectly.

“Unfair advantage. Hey, there’s a cloakroom. Shall we drop our coats off?”

Emi was starting to realise that, while Rin might appear to be wandering through life in a kind of fugue-state, she was actually incredibly observant. She noticed details and patterns in her brief, vague glances that Emi couldn't have spotted with a magnifying glass and a spare hour. Which, given what Rin did for a living, made perfect sense.

Then again, there was still plenty about her that didn’t. As soon as she entered Accelerando’s foyer Rin had stopped in front of a mirrored section of wall, and was watching her own reflection with what looked like intense suspicion.

Emi didn’t like the way the woman was glaring at herself. She glanced quickly around to make sure no-one else was nearby. “Rin? Are you okay?”

“For a given value of okay, I’m okay.”

“Then why the look?”

Rin let out a tiny sigh. “This hat. It makes me look like a roofing nail.”

Emi sagged slightly, then nudged her past the mirror. “Damn, you had me worried for a moment there. You used to have a thing about reflections.”

“I used to have a thing about a lot of things.”

“So you’re okay with rubber ducks now?”

“No.” Rin shook her head, walking along beside her. “Rubber ducks are still creepy. Next time you see a rubber duck, look into its eyes. You’ll see. They have the cold dead stare of a killer.”

“Sounds like a great way to get thrown out of a toy store.” They had reached the cloakroom counter. Emi was just about to ask if Rin needed help with her jacket when the woman dipped her head, tugged open a fastening with her teeth and shrugged her way out in one smooth, practiced motion.

“Wow. Okay, who wants drinks while we’re waiting?”

 

Shizune had instructed them to find a table if they arrived first. Apparently she and her colleagues were regulars at Accelerando, often holding meetings and after-work gatherings there, even bringing along clients on occasion. Which, given the bar prices, gave Emi a very good indication of just how well-off Matsushima Legal was.

Between Lilly’s terrifying credit card and Shizune’s go-to venue, Emi was beginning to feel seriously underfunded. “Okay, that’s one unpronounceable white wine for Lilly, one spring water for me and a vodka and orange juice for Rin, minus the vodka.” She set the drinks carefully onto the tabletop and sat down. “Don’t make that face. Your bloodstream’s still fifty percent painkillers.”

Rin shrugged. “That’s okay. Is it freshly squeezed?”

“Yeah.” Emi put a straw into Rin’s glass. “They’ve got one of those machines.”

“Yum.”

“Thank you, Emi.” Lilly’s fingers found the wine glass, brought it up to her nose. She sniffed deeply, smiled. “Mm. Wonderful.”

Emi lifted her beaker in salute. “Cheers, and drink slowly. This round wiped out about half my month’s fun money.”

“Didn’t Shizune tell you to order on her tab?”

“Yeah, but I don’t really like doing that if she’s not around. Especially if she’s buying dinner.” The back of her jaw twitched, and before she knew it she was stifling a yawn. “Damn. Sorry.”

“Not flagging already, I hope?”

“It’s been kind of a full day. And I didn’t really sleep last night, so…” Emi blinked down into her glass, watching tiny bubbles swarming back up at her. “It’s weird. Feels like this has been going on forever, but that asshole only tried to flatten me, what, this time yesterday?”

“You’re right, it seems far longer.” Lilly took a small sip of wine. “Time plays tricks on the senses, I suppose. Hours, even years can pass you by, if you fail to pay them proper attention.”

There was something very sad, Emi thought, about the way Lilly had said that. A strange, wistful change in tone, as though she had started off talking to Emi and ended up speaking entirely to herself.

Maybe she was thinking about Hanako.

“You can’t trust time,” Rin was saying. She leaned down to her drink, took a sip through the straw. “Mm. It’s tricky. What was that book? With the clocks and the teacups and the cat?”

“Alice in Wonderland?”

“Not that one. Time’s Arrow. Or Brief History. Maybe both.”

Emi gave her a sour eye. “You did that deliberately.”

“Time only goes one way,” Rin continued, nodding very slightly to herself. “It’s asymmetrical. The other forces work in all directions but time only works in one direction which is why you can’t trust it.”

“Emi?” Lilly was looking completely confused. “Are you sure you left out the vodka?”

“If you drop a teacup on the floor it smashes.” Rin’s eyes, half-closed, were fixed on the surface of her orange juice. “It never squishes all back together again and jumps up into your hand. No matter how many teacups you drop that never ever happens. Also your mother gets really cross. But you know what?”

Emi smiled at her. She had an idea of where this was going. “Tell us.”

“Sometimes, if you’re very careful and work very hard, you can _make_ that happen. With glue. You won’t get the same cup, it’ll have all these holes and cracks and textures that weren’t there before, and that’s cool. Before it was just a teacup. Now it’s a teacup that knows what it’s like to hit the floor really hard. Anyway.” She stood up. “This teacup is kinda full. Will be back shortly.”

Emi watched her ambling away towards the bathroom. “Now I know why none of the cups at her Mom’s place match.”

“I had wondered.” Lilly closed her eyes, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Maybe I’m tired too. That actually seemed to make sense, towards the end.”

“Rin makes sense most of the time. She just makes it in a different way to the rest of us.”

“You know her far better than I do. Will she be all right, when this business is done?”

“She’s more all right than I’ve ever seen her.” Emi found herself smiling warmly. “I don’t know how much you can tell about what she’s doing, but she’s so independent now, way more than she ever was at school. And damn, she’s bendy.” A thought sprang into her mind then, quite unbidden, and it made her blush. “Um. One day she’s going to make some guy _very_ happy.”

“Guy?” Lilly smirked. “At the risk of sounding filthy-minded, I feel that restricting herself to lovers of only one gender would be most unlike Rin.”

“Lilly Satou, I’m shocked.” Emi snickered. “Still the bad girl in disguise, huh?”

Lilly sipped elegantly at her wine. “If only you knew. Meanwhile, back in the clean world, what are we going to do after this?”

“Hadn’t really thought that far ahead.” Emi sat back. “I still don’t feel comfortable leaving Rin on her own. Or me on my own, for that matter.”

“I think that’s wise, under the circumstances. On the other hand, I should probably go back to my hotel.”

“You gonna be okay there?”

“It’s quite secure, I assure you. Besides, I received my letter at work. There’s no indication our tormentor even knows where I’m staying.”

“That’s a relief. I’ll drive us back to the Tezukas’ and then call you a cab from there.”

A shadow crossed her. She glanced up and saw Rin standing over her.

She wasn’t alone. “Look what I found.”

Emi’s heart did a weird, nervous little jump in her chest. After five years, even seeing Shizune on a computer screen had been a strange enough experience. For her to be standing there at the end of the table was almost surreal.

She pushed herself upright and bowed. “Lilly, Shizune is here.”

Lilly stood up. As she did so, Shizune reached out to her, took one of Lilly’s hands in her own and, with the tips of two fingers, drew several symbols on the taller woman’s palm.

In response Lilly giggled, covering her mouth with her other hand; a surprisingly girlish, almost wicked sound. Then, as Shizune stepped back, Lilly signed something to her, the movements of her long fingers hesitant and unpractised.

Shizune grinned, grabbed Lilly and hugged her hard.

“Oh my God,” said Emi quietly. “Of all the things I thought I’d see today, that totally isn’t one of them.”

Rin was looking back towards the bar, a puzzled frown creasing her face. “There was a squeaky girl.”

“A what now?”

“A girl who squeaked. When I was coming out of the bathroom she was there at the door, and as soon as she saw me she went _eep_ and ran away with her hands over her face.”

 _Even here?_ Emi patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Rin. You know how people are.”

“No,” said Rin thoughtfully. “No, I really don’t.”


	12. Kill List

Shizune had brought a tablet computer, a sleek silvery thing that spoke for her in a clear, surprisingly feminine voice. It probably cost a month’s rent on Emi’s flat, but it was plain Shizune didn’t like it much. She swiped and stabbed at its screen with obvious distaste.

“Please excuse my use of this contraption,” the tablet lilted. Shizune was sitting back with her arms folded, as if to distance herself from it. “I would have brought a translator, but I still don’t want to involve anyone else just yet.”

“That’s probably wise,” Lilly replied, enunciating very clearly. Shizune had taken a seat directly opposite her. “If only from a legal standpoint.”

Shizune spent a few more seconds brutalising the tablet. “It’s an ugly thing, though, relying on machines when we’re face to face.”

“Hey,” said Emi brightly, “at least it sounds like a person. Not a robot or Stephen Hawking or something.”

Shizune winked at her. “I’ll have to take your word for that.”

It was a slow, slightly laborious way of talking, and Emi could see how much it frustrated Shizune to have her words spoken by cold electronics. Still, as both she and Lilly had mentioned, it made sense not to bring any of Matsushima’s translation team on-board if it could be avoided. Not only could it expose them to danger, but it sounded like Shizune was sailing some legally murky waters in her efforts to discover more about what was going on. Poking around in an active murder investigation wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

That had been worrying Emi a lot. “Hey Shizune, you’re not going to get into any trouble doing this, are you?”

“Nothing I can’t handle, thank you.”

“I’m very sorry everyone.” Without warning Rin had pushed her chair back and stood up. “Emi, could I speak with you privately please?”

She turned on her heel and walked away. Emi pushed herself straight, stammered an apology and went after her. “Rin? Where are you going?”

Rin stopped next to an empty table, looked quickly around, then moved a few more steps towards a carved pillar. “Here. We need to talk here.”

“Why here?”

“Because other places are suboptimal. This is the best place.”

“Rin, what’s wrong?” Emi glanced back at the table, saw Shizune watching her, one hand raised to adjust her glasses. “Is it Shizune’s tablet? Do you not like it talking?”

“What?” Rin’s eyebrows went up very slightly. “Don’t be silly, I’ve got one of those.”

“You have not.” Emi glared. “How come you’ve got one like that and I’ve only got a crappy little Samsung?”

Rin leaned closer to her, so their foreheads were almost touching. “Emi, focus. List your thoughts. We’re being watched.”

She rolled her eyes. “Is that all? Come on, Rin, it happens. Just try to ignore it.”

“Not looked at. I know what looked at looks like. There’s someone watching us. Corner table, by the swimming fishies.”

Emi couldn’t see that area of the bar from where she stood. Which, she realised with a slightly guilty start, was exactly why Rin had chosen it.

She drew closer to the pillar itself, and peered around.

“I think it’s Squeaky Girl,” said Rin.

Sure enough, within a few seconds Emi had spotted a young woman sitting on her own in a far corner of the bar, partly concealed by the edge of a brightly-lit aquarium tank. She had short brown hair and a black wool raincoat draped over her shoulders, and was keeping her face concealed behind a menu, peeking occasionally over the top of it at the back of Shizune’s head.

“Great,” Emi muttered. “As if I didn’t have enough to deal with. Rin, it’s fine. Go back to the others.”

“Where are you going? Are you going to confront her? I’ll come with you. You can knock her down and I’ll kick her.”

“What is this, Dragonball Rin?” Emi waved her away. “No need to go Super Saiyan on anyone just yet. I’ll be back in five, okay?”

“Five what?”

Emi gave her a gentle nudge. “Go.”

Rin turned away and began to wander back towards the table, looking everywhere but at the aquarium. Emi waited until she was halfway there and then set off in the other direction, skirting around the edge of the bar.

Accelerando might not have been as tiny as its frontage suggested, but its interior space was too small for Emi to stay hidden on her way to the woman’s table. She did her best to look casual, though, as if she was merely heading towards the bar while checking out the small, ferociously expensive pieces of art ranged tastefully around the walls.

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to deal with gawkers, especially back when she had been out with Rin before the breakdown. Most people were perfectly polite, of course, but sadly there would always be those who considered someone with missing limbs to be somehow requiring of their attention. Emi’s usual tactic in these situations was to ‘accidentally’ barge into them, or nudge the table and send a drink into their lap, then apologise profusely for her clumsiness and show them what her legs were made of. Normally the shock of discovering that she was walking around on twin prosthetics was enough to throw the rubberneckers entirely off-guard, sending them away shamed and stammering.

It was an ugly kind of victory, and one she had largely given up on pursuing, but if Shizune and the others were being observed for any reason other than idle curiosity Emi needed to know about it. She strode quickly up to the table, pulled back a chair and dropped into it. “Watcha doing?”

The woman let out a high, startled yelp. The menu skittered out of her hands and tumbled noisily onto the tabletop, striking the beaker of iced water she’d been nursing and tipping it wildly.

Emi grabbed the glass on reflex, but she wasn’t looking at it.

“Holy shit,” she gasped. “ _Misha?_ ”

“Emi!” Shiina Mikado’s face had gone crimson. “Wh-wh-where did you come from?”

Perhaps it was no surprise that Emi hadn’t recognised Misha from a distance; the woman was almost nothing like she remembered. That trademark pink hair was now a sand-brown bob framing a lean, pretty face. She had lost some weight all over, and under the wool coat her clothes were well-tailored but determinedly average, the white blouse and black skirt combination that half the Office Ladies in Tokyo wore every working day of their lives.

There was no mistaking the colour of her eyes, though; dark gold, like tiger’s eye gems. “That was you, wasn’t it?” snapped Emi. “Outside the bathroom. As soon as Rin came out you screamed and ran away.”

Somehow, Misha managed to look panicked and offended at the same time. “I didn’t scream.”

“All right, squeaked.” Emi glared. “You frightened her, Misha. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because…” Misha wrapped her arms around her middle, as if she was cold. “Because I’m not supposed to be here. If Shicchan found out I was here I don’t know what I’d do.”

“So why are you? And how did you find us, anyway? Are you stalking her now, is that it?”

“No, it’s not like that.” She was as quiet as she had been on the phone, so different from the boisterous, randomly laughing Misha that Emi remembered. Controlled, locked-down. _Careful_. “Please don’t be angry at me, Emi-chan.”

Emi bunched her fists. “I am trying _really_ hard not to be,” she hissed. A couple of nearby diners were already peering in their direction. She drew closer, lowered her voice. “But look at it from our point of view, Misha. You know what’s going on, right? What we talked about?”

“You said… You said someone had been sending stuff…”

“It’s worse than that. A lot worse. People have been hurt. Shizune said she’d help us try to find out what was happening and invited us here, and what do we find? Someone skulking around, hiding her face, spying on us from the shadows. How am I _supposed_ to feel?”

“I knew it. I _knew_ you weren’t telling me everything, I could hear it in your voice.” Misha looked back towards the table, clearly horrified. “Oh no. Shicchan’s in trouble too, isn’t she?”

“Maybe. I hope not.” Emi rubbed a hand down her face. She suddenly felt immensely tired. “You still care about her a lot, don’t you?”

The answer was barely more than a whisper. “Yes.”

“Then just go over and tell her.”

Misha shook her head. “I can’t do that, Emi-chan.”

“Because you two don’t talk anymore.” Emi sighed. Misha looked so dejected, sitting there, so lost and alone that it was impossible to remain angry at her. “Look, I don’t know what happened between you and her, and I don’t care. It’s not important. You know what’s important?” She held up her hand, thumb and forefinger a couple of centimetres apart. “This is what’s important.”

Misha didn’t answer her, just squinted warily at Emi’s fingers.

“This is how close I got to losing my best friend today. Not losing like we had a fight and now she won’t talk to me anymore. I mean losing like _gone_.” She narrowed the gap slightly, staring through it at Misha. “I was _this close_ to never being able to talk to her again. Ever. Never being able to apologise to her for all the times I hurt her feelings, or I got mad because I couldn’t understand her, or I was too busy to spend time with her. This close to never getting to tell her how amazing she is.”

She sat back. “Life’s really fragile right now, Misha. It’s like we’re walking around on, I dunno, a bubble or something, and any second it can pop just like _that_.”

She snapped her fingers. Or at least she tried to; she’d never quite learned the trick of it. Her thumb and fingers skimmed silently past each other. “Shit.”

In spite of everything, Misha let out a short, nervous laugh.

Emi tried twice more, then gave up. “Screw it. Misha, there’s someone over there who can do that way better than I can. Will you please just come over and say hello?”

 

It took a few minutes more persuasion, and a more detailed explanation of what had happened during the past two days, but eventually Emi was able to take Misha’s hand and lead her back across the bar.

“I won’t stay,” the girl breathed, as they approached.

Emi squeezed her hand a little tighter. “The hell you won’t. Hey everyone, I brought a signer.”

Rin blinked up at Misha. “Hello Squeaky Girl. Hey Lilly, Squeaky Girl’s here and it’s Misha.”

Shizune had her back to the bar, and hadn’t seen Emi and Misha approach. But as Rin spoke she twisted in her seat.

Her eyes met Misha’s, and instantly a succession of emotions flurried across her face in wild succession – shock, delight, anger, something else that Emi couldn’t describe for certain but which brought a spontaneous blush to her cheeks. Then, just as quickly as they had arrived the emotions were gone, her face locked down like a bank vault, a bespectacled mask. She stood up.

Emi moved towards her. “Please don’t get mad, Shizune. She didn’t mean-“

Shizune, very slowly and carefully, put a finger to her lips.

“Oooh-kay.” Emi closed her mouth and stepped back. _Shutting up now…_

She saw Shizune sign something to Misha, the movements of her hands fast and choppy. Immediately Misha responded in kind; silently, not translating out loud as she always used to. Her mouth was clamped into a line, her hands flying as quick and sure as Shizune’s.

For the next few seconds, all Emi could do was stand and watch what must have been an extremely vicious and escalating argument between the two women, conducted in perfect silence. It only ended when Misha made a violent cutting motion with one hand and, with her other, pointed at the exit.

Even Emi understood that particular piece of sign language: _shut up or I’m out of here._

Misha held the pose, her arm rigid, hands shaking with emotion. Finally, Shizune put up her own hands as if in supplication, turned from her and sat back down.

Emi heard Misha let out a long, shivering breath. “Please forgive me, everyone.” She flopped forward into a bow so low her head almost connected with the table. “I’m so sorry, Rin-chan. I should have said hello as soon as I saw you.”

“That’s okay, I like your hair.”

“Misha,” said Lilly, “I’m sure you’re aware this is a surprise for all of us. But I’m glad you’re here, thank you. It can’t have been easy.”

Emi was quite glad Lilly couldn’t see Shizune’s expression when she said that. She slid back into her seat next to Rin. “So, what have you all been talking about while I was off collecting waifs and strays?”

“Shizune has spent her time most productively,” Lilly smiled, as Misha pulled a nearby chair across and sat down. “She was about to tell us about the gun used in the attack on Rin.”

Shizune nodded, and began to tap and swipe at the tablet screen. “Don’t ask where this comes from. The rifle was World War Two vintage, Arisaka Type 99. A very low-quality production model. My contact was stunned that it even fired one shot before blowing up.”

Emi could see Misha frowning at the tablet. “Any idea who owned it?”

She watched Shizune reach for the machine again, but this time Misha leaned forwards and took her hands. “Please, Shicchan,” she said, when she was certain Shizune was looking at her lips. ”Let me help. Just for today.”

A shiver passed through Shizune, then. Emi saw it clearly, a brief, subtle shudder through her frame. Not of anger or revulsion, but more like…

_No._ She must have been mistaken. Emi glanced across at Rin, wondering if she had seen it too. In response Rin just smiled, then half-closed her eyes and shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

Shizune was drawing her hands back. She rubbed them together for a moment, as if unsure of what to do, then she stiffened, squared her shoulders, and began to sign.

“The gun was owned by a man called Jiro Umeda,” said Misha.

Emi didn’t recognise the name, and said so. “He couldn’t be our guy, could he?”

Shizune gave her a wry smile. “Embarrassing if it was,” Misha translated. “Mr Umeda is ninety-two. He was a soldier, and must have smuggled the gun back somehow after the war.”

“So how did it get from there to Niiza?”

“Shicchan says his house was burgled. Oh, that poor old man, how sad.”

“That ‘poor old man’ was keeping a lethal weapon in his attic,” said Lilly coldly. “When was the burglary?”

“The police don’t know, he didn’t report it at the time.”

“Hardly surprising. Possession of a firearm is a very serious offence, even if you are ninety-two.”

“His daughter-in-law finally reported it after a family visit, but she didn’t know anything about the rifle.” Misha looked glum. “So is that, um, what do they say on TV? A dead end? Shicchan says maybe, but we’ll look into it.” She brightened instantly. “Okay!”

Emi hid a smile behind her hand. Somebody might have finally located Misha’s volume control, but deep down she hadn’t really changed all that much. “Did Namba pass on those letters like he said he would?”

“Yes, my contacts in Yagi’s office gave me the whole list.”

“Just how long a list is this list?” asked Rin. “If there needs to be a list that sounds like a lot of letters.”

There was a few seconds silent exchange between Shizune and Misha. Then: “Well, there’s Lilly’s and Shicchan’s. And also Rin’s and Emi’s although they got thrown away, is that right?” Misha looked over to Emi, who nodded. “So that’s four. Then, um… Natsume Ooe and Naomi Inoue. They got one between them, because they live together now. Aw, that’s sweet.”

“Really? They’re still an item?” Emi grinned. “Good for them.”

“Apparently that letter had some additional text. Looks like our tormentor doesn’t approve of same-sex relationships.” Misha’s expression fell. “How horrible,” she whispered.

“They haven’t been harmed, I hope,” said Lilly.

“No, the letter turned up at their… Their office?” Another quick burst of sign. “Oh, they work together at NHK. They make documentaries now. Hmm.”

“Anyone else?”

“Saki Enomoto? Oh, I remember her, she was so cute. She had a cane, I think.”

“That’s right,” Lilly whispered. “The poor girl has a degenerative disease.”

“Yes,” said Rin. “But slowly. She has to use a wheelchair sometimes, but most of the time not. Also she is still cute, and has a very large muscley husband, so I think she’ll be okay.”

Emi’s eyebrows went up. “How the hell do you know that?”

“They were at a launch party for a game I did paintings for. She was the voice for one of the girls in the game, even though the girl in the game didn’t look like her and did not have a large muscley husband. Also no cane.” Rin frowned to herself. “They sounded the same, though. I found that confusing at the time, although I was careful not to tell anyone.”

“You go to launch parties now?”

“Not many. Some of my clients are okay with me being me, but some aren’t so I have to be somebody else. I don’t go to those.”

“ _I_ don’t get to go to launch parties.”

“You went to Korea.”

Emi pouted. “Not the same.”

Shizune was signing again, her expression troubled. Misha watched her hands for a few moments, then gasped. “Oh no…”

“What?” Emi sat forwards. “Is she okay? What happened?”

“She… No, she’s fine, but yesterday evening someone was at her house, a prowler. Her husband was home, though, and scared him off.”

“Any description?”

“Young, male, wearing a black hooded top.”

“Shit,” hissed Emi. “ _Shit._ That’s him. That’s the guy that went round to my Mom’s place.”

“The police were informed immediately,” Misha said. “Let’s hope they’ve got the brains to connect these incidents. Shicchan, that’s not very nice.”

“Is that all of them?” Lilly asked. “Or at least, all that the police are aware of…”

“Everything that was sent to Yagi’s office, yes. I also had some of my people call around as many Yamaku students as I have contacts details for. They had reached nineteen when I left the office, no reports of any trouble.”

“That’s a relief, in a way.” Lilly was toying nervously with the stem of her wine glass. “I had feared it might be more.”

“But in another way it’s more scary,” Emi replied. “I mean, why just us? What’s this sick little fuck got against us personally?”

“I think…” Misha raised a finger. “I… I mean, maybe…” She glanced around the table, and suddenly the confidence seemed to drain out of her. Her gaze dropped to the tabletop. “No, I’m sorry. I’m being silly.”

Shizune glared at her for a second, then poked her in the arm, quite hard. Misha winced. “Ow! That hurt, Shicchan.”

“She’s right, though,” Emi told her. “You need to say what’s on your mind.”

“Well, all I was going to say was… It’s because of you, isn’t it?”

“Me?”

“All of you. The ones he sent mean stuff to, you’re… You know…”

Emi’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Disabled?”

“Girls,” said Rin.

Misha rolled her eyes. “ _Successful._ ” She looked around the table again, and made a kind of exasperated growl under her breath. She began to sign rapidly again, her quiet voice rising fractionally as she became more animated. “Lilly scouts for an international blind school. Shicchan’s an amazing lawyer. Rin paints and goes to parties, Emi gets gold medals and she’s been on packets of vitamin drink.”

“Oh God, that stuff. I’d forgotten.” Emi coloured. “Seriously, people, just don’t.”

“A voice actress, TV makers… You’ve all done so well.” Misha looked down. “Maybe he’s jealous.”

“That makes a sick kind of sense,” said Emi. “Son of a… What, he can’t stand the thought of us broken dolls making something of our lives?”

“It is possible,” Lily agreed. “And if nothing else, our higher profiles make us easy to find.” She took a deep breath, put the glass down carefully. “Shizune, I hate to impose on you further, you’ve already done so much. But-“

Shizune was signing rapidly. “I already called her. She didn’t answer her phone, I’m sorry.”

“No,” said Lilly, her head dipping. “She never does.”

“Maybe she’s just busy, Lilly-chan,” said Misha gently, putting her hand on Lilly’s arm. “You know she’s away a lot now.”

Lilly didn’t answer. She merely nodded, and closed her eyes.

Emi could see Shizune looking around the table, her expression cool and focussed, her eyes flitting first to Rin, perched nervously upright in her chair; to Lilly, lost in melancholy thought; to Misha and then, hurriedly, to her.

“ _Thanks_ ,” Emi mouthed. Shizune nodded sadly.

Then she straightened up in her seat, tapped Misha lightly on the shoulder to draw her attention.

“Well, I believe that concludes the first part of our business here,” Misha relayed. “I’ll continue my investigations from home, and keep you all appraised.” She half-rose. “Okay, it was really nice seeing you all-“

Shizune raised one finger, turned her hand over, and stabbed it downwards. “Oooh, on the other hand maybe I’d better stay right here.”

Emi watched her drop back down into her chair. _You don’t get away that easily_ , she thought. _I’ve got a feeling Shizune’s got plans for you._


	13. The Nail that Sticks Up

Emi Takada’s car was nestled in the Mori Tower parking garage, looking small and fake under the fluorescent lights; a boxy blue toy, like something from a capsule machine. Shiina Mikado stood next to it, wearing the widest smile she could manage, and watched Emi help Lilly Satou into the front passenger seat.

_It’s almost over_ , she told herself. _Just a little longer now_.

“You okay there?” Emi was asking.

“Fine, thank you.” Lilly sounded unsure. She’d drunk at least two more glasses of wine during the meal.

“Lilly?”

“Hm?”

“Seat belt.”

“Of course, of course.” Shiina watched her through the window, saw Lilly fumbling for the strap. Rin Tezuka was already in the back seat, lolling against the car door as if she lacked the strength to hold herself upright. She hadn’t drunk anything other than orange juice, but had complained midway through the evening that her head was hurting again. Emi had taken a packet of pills from her bag and given her two, and Shiina couldn’t remember Rin saying very much at all after that.

Emi closed Lilly’s door, then came around to Shiina’s side of the car. “Remember what we talked about, Misha. This asshole might decide to branch out, so stay safe, yeah?”

Emi had used her old name again, but she’d been doing it all evening. Shiina didn’t bother to correct her. “I’ll be careful, Emi-chan.”

Quite unexpectedly, Emi lurched forwards and hugged her awkwardly. “It was really good seeing you again.”

“You too.”

“You’ll stay in touch?”

“Of course I will,” she lied. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her arms and hug Emi back, not properly. “I’ve got all your numbers now.”

The last part was true. Emi had insisted on tapping her details into Shiina’s phone, along with those of Lilly and Rin and Shizune. As soon as she was alone, of course, she would delete them all. Just in case she suffered a moment of weakness – while drunk, perhaps, or especially lonely – and was tempted to use them.

Misha had been told, a great many times and by a great many people, that she was loud and annoying and uncomfortable to be around; that her behaviour was disruptive, that her voice and her laugh were obnoxious. And although Shiina Mikado had left Misha very far behind her, she would no longer risk inflicting herself on anyone she didn’t have to.

“I’ll look forward to it.” Emi straightened up, in that slightly stiff, mechanical manner forced on her by the prosthetics, and turned to Shizune.

“Thanks for everything, scary girl. I mean it.”

Shizune beamed and signed a rapid response. “I’ll call you whenever I hear anything,” Shiina translated. “I’m sure you’ll be quite sick of me before all this is through.”

“Not a chance.” Emi winked at her, opened the car door and folded herself down inside.

Shiina head the engine clatter into life. She raised a hand to wave, and as she did so she noticed that Rin was looking at her through the window, intensely, her head tilted slightly as if Shiina was a puzzle she was trying to solve.

As the car pulled off, a sudden smile, small but quite beautiful, lit up Rin’s face.

And then they were gone, a little blue toy rolling away from her under the striplights. It swung towards a ramp, passed behind a wall, and vanished.

Shiina let out a long breath. One more thing to do and then she could escape, find her way to the bus stop and go home. Crawl under her duvet and forget that this terrifying, shameful night had ever happened.

She turned. “It’s time for me to go, Shicchan.”

Shizune didn’t reply. She just stood there, studying Shiina with that cool, analytical gaze that made her feel as though she were a bug under a microscope.

“It was good seeing you again. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I hope everything’s going to be-“

Shizune stepped forwards and slapped her, brutally hard, across the face.

She stumbled back, too shocked even to cry out.

[How dare you?] Shizune’s hands were trembling as she signed. [How dare you? Not one word in three years. Not one. I emailed and you never replied. I texted and my phone was blocked. I begged my father to call your parents, and when he finally did they told him you’d moved away.] Shizune’s face was twisted with fury. She was signing so frantically now that Shiina could barely read her. [You made them lie for you! How despicable!]

Not a single word was untrue. Shiina couldn’t deny any of it, even if she had wanted to. All she could do was to stand there under the hard harsh light, her face hot with shame and the sting of the slap, and watch Shizune list her crimes, one after the other.

[And when you finally resurface I find you skulking in the dark, spying on my friends, hiding behind my back like a thief. How dare you?]

“It’s not like that,” Shiina spoke out loud, hoping Shizune could read her lips in the unnatural light. She didn’t trust her hands. “I just needed to make sure you were okay, Shicchan!”

[I’m not okay! How could I be okay?] Shizune took another step forwards, making Shiina cringe away from her. [I haven’t been okay since you cut me off. All I ever wanted to do was apologise to you, and you never even gave me the chance!]

“What? I don’t understand, there’s nothing to apologise for.”

[Liar! I know I hurt you. I know I drove you away. I hate myself for it.]

“No, please don’t say that!” Shiina was being loud again, horrifyingly so. She could hear her own voice echoing around the car park. The sound of it made her want to vomit, but she couldn’t keep it down. “You were supposed to hate Misha, not yourself!”

[That was never going to happen!] Shizune’s face was crumpling. She stopped signing for a second to drag her glasses off and rub her sleeve roughly across her eyes. [You were my best friend, my only friend! I could never hate you!]

“You were supposed to forget all about her! You were supposed to let her go!” Shiina shut her eyes and staggered away. What little control she had left was gone, shattered by Shizune’s words. She got two steps away before she broke down entirely and collapsed to her knees, sobs tearing their way up from deep inside her, as painful as a slap, as bitter as bile. “I thought you were okay! _I thought you’d forgotten all about me!_ ”

And then, impossibly, Shizune was down beside her, arms around her, drawing her close. Hugging her tightly, stroking her hair. Making the only voluntary vocal sound Shiina had ever heard from her; so soft, so quiet that it was barely audible over her own weeping.

“ _Shh,_ ” Shizune breathed, as they knelt together on the cold concrete. “ _Shh._ ”

 

Shizune drove her out of Roppongi, away from the crowds, to a street where the bars clustered under a forest of buzzing neon as if huddling together for protection. And there, in the back of a sports bar so narrow it was little more than a corridor she bought Shiina skewers of fried chicken and a large brandy. [Drink that, then eat those.]

Shiina could barely look up from the tabletop. [You already bought me dinner, Shicchan.]

[You picked at a few salad leaves. That’s not eating.] She pushed the brandy towards her, defiantly. [Drink. You’re still shaking.]

Shiina lifted the glass. It took both hands wrapped around it to get it to her mouth without spilling, and when she sipped it the vile stuff coursed down her throat like acid. She almost gagged.

[Better?]

She nodded. [I’m sorry to be such a bother.]

[Are you going to stop apologising, or am I going to have to slap you again?]

Shizune was smiling as she signed that, but as soon her hands stopped moving she began to rub one unconsciously with the other. Her right hand was hurting.

Somehow, that made Shiina feel even more guilty. By way of apology she gulped down a mouthful of the brandy and then picked up one of the skewers, nibbled off a section of chicken.

It was delicious. Shiina normally didn’t allow herself fried foods, hadn’t done in a long time. Now she remembered why. She forced herself to set the skewer down.

[So.] Shizune sat back. [How did you find us?]

For a few seconds Shiina couldn’t answer. She tried desperately to think of a lie, an evasion. An excuse to get up and run out into the night.

And then she thought: _why?_

It didn’t matter if she left or if she stayed. Every wall she had worked to erect in the past three years was already gone. Shiina’s mask had been torn from her; she was exposed, laid open, gutted like a fish.

There was no point in hiding anything anymore. [I called your office,] she signed miserably.

[Try again. I told them not to say where I’d gone.]

[They didn’t. They didn’t need to.] She paused for a moment, took another gulp of the brandy. Waited as it traced a line of fire down into her gut. [When I got that call from Emi I knew things were worse than she was letting on. And I just got this stupid idea in my head that something had happened to you. I got really scared, Shicchan.]

Shizune adjusted her glasses slightly, as if doing so would allow her to bore even deeper into Shiina’s soul. [Go on.]

[I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t do my work. I couldn’t do anything. So eventually I gave up and called your office, just to ask if you were there. But they said you were out with clients.]

[And?]

[Well, you told me a long time ago that you only felt comfortable at three places. It’s karaoke night at Doki Doki Danger, and Bright Lighthouse is closed for redecoration. So it had to be Accelerando.]

Shizune raised her eyebrows. [Good work. You always were smarter than you gave yourself credit for.]

[Not that smart, Shicchan, I went to the other two first.]

One of Shizune’s hands went to her mouth, as if to hide a smile. Then she glanced away, closed her eyes for a moment.

[Shiina, I’m so sorry.]

[That’s okay, I deserved it.]

[Not for the slap, damn right you deserved that.] Her shoulders rose fractionally in a shrug. [I mean for everything else.]

Earlier she had looked furious. Now Shizune just seemed dejected, which was far, far worse. Shiina could hardly bear to see it. For a moment – a weak, shameful moment that immediately made her want to pick up one of the skewers and drive it hard into her own thigh – all Shiina wanted to do was take Shizune’s hands in hers, and hold them tightly.

[You didn’t do anything,] she signed instead.

[I did, though, didn’t I? At school, and for a long time afterwards.] Shizune picked up one of the skewers and bit off a nugget, began to chew on it thoughtfully. [I was always hard on people, Shiina, you can’t deny that. I used to tell myself I was being tough but fair, that it was for their own good. That they needed me to make them happy, otherwise they’d just sit around and be lazy. But it wasn’t true. At best, I was using them. At worst, I was being a dick.]

Shiina coloured. [That wasn’t how it felt to me, Shicchan.]

[You were a special case. In lots of ways.] Shizune smiled sadly. [But in other ways, all the ways that mattered, I treated you worst of all, don’t you think?]

[I don’t know what you mean.]

[Taking people for granted: that’s worse than manipulating them.] Shizune paused for a moment, and Shiina realised that opening up like this was at least as hard, if not harder, than it was for Shiina.

[In that last year, after Nakai died, things were so hard for everyone. Every day a new story in the papers, every day a new rumour about lawsuits or financial troubles. So I convinced myself that they all needed my help. I went into overdrive, I think. And I dragged you along for the ride, didn’t I?]

Shiina frowned. [You didn’t drag me anywhere. I stayed by your side because that’s the only place I wanted to be.]

[And I knew that. I worked you like a dog for the sake of that stupid Student Council.] She made a disgusted face. [I’m so ashamed of myself, looking back. Repulsed. I’m just glad you managed to get decent grades in spite of everything I put you through.]

Shiina barked a laugh. It was barely out of her before she clamped a hand over her mouth. _Fucking brandy!_

Shizune had seen it, though. Even if she hadn’t, she couldn’t have failed to note the startled reactions of the bar’s other customers. [What?]

[Nothing. Everything’s fine, Shicchan.] She saw Shizune’s eyes narrow. [Honestly.]

Several seconds passed. Shiina did the best she could, keeping herself very still, focussing on the way the TV behind the counter sent tiny flickers of reflected colour skittering off Shizune’s glasses. But, in the end, she didn’t stand a chance.

She folded. [I’m sorry, I lied. My grades weren’t all that good.]

[How bad were they?]

[Bad.] Shiina grinned nervously. [Really, really, really bad. Sorry.]

[You told me they were okay.]

[I couldn’t tell you the truth, it was too awful. And I didn’t want to trouble you, Shicchan.]

Shizune looked horrified. [How did you get into college?]

[I didn’t. I couldn’t go anywhere. I’d failed everything. I didn’t have any qualifications. I managed to get a temp job, but I got fired from that after a few weeks.] She smiled ruefully. [For disruptive behaviour. A couple of months later I got another one and the same thing happened. Turns out the only person who could stand to be around me was someone who’d never heard me talking.]

[Shiina, I-]

This time, she did reach out to take Shizune’s hands, if only to stop her words. She shook her head, then began to sign again. [It’s okay, really. I mean, things were bad, for a long time. Mom and Dad were really kind, but I could tell what a disappointment I was to them. I got really low, Shicchan. I thought all kinds of bad things.]

[No. Don’t say that.]

[It’s true, sorry. But then…] She paused, wondering how much she should say. Perhaps there were some things she should keep secret, at least for now. [But I had some good luck. I got in touch with someone, someone I could talk to about what was happening. And after a while, I realised what I needed to do.]

This was going to be the hardest part. She drained the brandy. [Shicchan, do you remember that day, back in school? I told you something. I told you that I wanted to be with you. I confessed to you.]

[Of course I remember.] Shizune blushed slightly. [Do you honestly think I’d forget something like that?]

Shiina smirked. [I tried to. You rejected me, and that was really hard. And then you said you still wanted to be my friend. And that was even harder. But I told myself that being around you, just being your friend, would be enough. And in lots of ways it was. I don’t regret making the decision to stay by your side, Shicchan. Not for a second. But…]

[But what?]

[But I never stopped loving you.]

She saw the look on Shizune’s face change – from concern and apprehension to shock, embarrassment. Something else that she couldn’t quite fathom, and if she stopped to try she would lose her nerve. [I’m so sorry, Shicchan, I know that’s not easy to hear. It’s not easy for me to tell you, either. But it’s true.] She shrugged helplessly. [I was in love with you all the way through school, and afterwards too.]

[Why didn’t you say anything?] Shizune’s signing was becoming unfocussed, imprecise. Her hands were shaking. [Why didn’t you let me know that’s how you felt?]

[Because I knew you didn’t feel the same way. It would have just caused us both more pain. But you see, that was what was holding me back. I was still Misha then, and Misha wanted you. I was twenty-one and still a lovesick schoolgirl.] She smiled, and for the first time in as long as she could remember the expression didn’t feel like a disguise.

She couldn’t quite decide whether that was due to alcohol or honesty, but for the moment it didn’t matter.

[So I left Misha behind. I dyed my hair back to brown. I started seeing a speech therapist. I enrolled in cram classes, days at first and then evening classes when I got a part-time job. I’m working now, Shicchan, in the same college where I’m taking my exams and doing my advanced sign qualifications.]

Shizune looked at her oddly. [Isn’t that a conflict of interest?]

[It’s okay, they don’t mind. And I’m doing well. I have some friends now, some from work and one from before. I can pay my parents some rent money. Some days I almost feel like a grown-up.]

[And that’s why you cut me off.] Shizune looked away for a moment. [It all makes sense now. Thank you for telling me.]

[I’m so sorry, Shicchan.]

[No more apologies, Shiina. Just tell me one thing.]

[Of course, anything.]

[Did it work?]

Shiina paused. [I thought it had. But then Emi called, and suddenly all I could think about was making sure you were safe.] She slumped back in her seat. [I guess I never got over you after all.]

[Well, that’s good, you little twit, because I never got over you either.] Shizune leaned towards her, half over the table. [Don’t you understand? Why do you think I hated myself so much for driving you away? Why do you think I asked Emi to call you? I _had no idea how much I needed you until you’d gone!_ ]

Shiina stared at her, completely unable to process what she’d just seen Shizune say. She didn’t even realise that there was music coming from her bag until she noticed Shizune’s phone trying to crawl off the tabletop.

They both reached for their respective mobiles at the same moment, Shiina wondering if Shizune was as glad of the distraction as she was. She saw Shizune flip hers open and frown at the screen.

Hers was still chiming. She pulled it free and swiped it. “Hello?”

“ _Misha, it’s Emi. Where are you? Are you home?_ ”

“Um, no. I’m still out with Shicchan. Is something wrong?”

“ _I just texted her. We were listening to the car radio and I think something’s happened. Are you anywhere near a TV?_ ”

“Hold on.” Shizune was sliding out from behind the table. Shiina watched her step across to the counter, reach up to the screen and switch channels.

The picture changed, floodlit green sports field flicking into rain-soaked grey and fluttering sparks of blue-white light. “NHK, is that right? I think there’s a breaking story.”

She got up to stand next to Shizune, initially unsure of what she was looking at. The scene was moving, jolting, the camera being held by someone trying to walk backwards. She could see a street, utterly unremarkable, apartment blocks and vending machines, but it seemed to be half-full of police cars and uniformed men.

Text was scrolling across the lower edge of the screen: _…suspect in the murder of architecture graduate apprehended in…_

“Oh my God. Emi?”

A knot of policemen moved past the camera. In their midst, a hunched figure, head obscured by a draped blanket. Shiina watched as a car door opened to admit the captive and then a hand came up over the camera lens. The picture whirled away into a frozen smear of static.

“ _What is it? What’s happened?_ ”

“Emi-chan… I think they’ve caught him. It’s over.”


	14. Gregor Samsa’s Unsettling Dreams

The gun went off with a hard, flat sound, like two slabs of wood clapped together.

Emi launched herself off the blocks, surging away from the start line almost before the sound of the pistol reached her. It was pure reflex, nothing that required conscious thought. All her preparations – stance, breathing, target - were done long ago. She had reduced herself to a kind of bound energy, almost without intent, a point of pure focus. A bullet waiting to be fired.

As the hammer fell, she was gone.

A hundred metres were already behind her, the curve of the track approaching fast. She accelerated slightly, putting her head forward, keeping her balance as she shifted her weight to compensate for the curve. She felt her right thigh twinge, barely noticeable, easily ignored, a flicker of pain in her back that she left behind like the air swirling in her wake.

The line was within touching distance. She pushed her head out and down, heard the timer chirp, and slowed. Executed her trademark bounce-turn and trotted back to the start line.

Kamiya showed her the timer readout as she got close. _27.58._ “God damn it.”

He shrugged. “Point two up on the last run.”

“Point two?” Emi bounced on her blades. She was warm, sweating hard, but it had been dark for an hour and the air temperature was tumbling. She didn’t want to cool off just yet. “Come on, Coach, that’s like, four seconds off my practice best.”

He stuffed the readout back into his pocket. “Yeah, and five days ago you got clipped by a car. I told you to ease back into this, didn’t I?”

“I am.”

“Yeah, nice try.” He jerked his head back towards the bleachers. “We’re done for tonight.”

“One more run. I can shave a second off that, easy.”

“I’m sure you could, before spending the next two weeks in a wheelchair.” He folded his arms tightly, his breath puffing out in clouds of vapour. “You’re still favouring your right leg and that latissimus isn’t fixed. I can see it from here.”

Emi batted her eyes. “Aw, come on, Coach. One more to wind down.”

“Yeah, maybe the puppy dog act worked when you were twenty.” He grinned. “Go. Physio, shower, home. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Meanie,” she replied, playfully raising the pitch of her voice and sticking her tongue out. Then she winked at him and jogged away.

It was only when she was inside, far away from Kamiya’s analytical gaze, that she let the fake smile slide off her face.

 

Later, on the train, she chose her seat carefully; close to the door, and on the far side of the carriage from the platforms, so she had a good view of everyone who boarded. Usually she would put on headphones and watch a cartoon on her phone, maybe read a book, but today she stayed bolt upright, tense and watchful with her bag half-open on her lap.

There was a lipstick-sized pepper spray in it, next to her phone. Rather a grey area legally, Shizune had told her, but a risk worth taking. It was Emi’s first trip on public transport since Osamu Kodai’s killer her been arrested, and she had no intention of relaxing just yet.

Despite assurances from Assistant Police Inspector Namba, Emi’s doors and windows stayed very firmly locked.

Opposite her, a businessman slumped over his briefcase, two schoolgirls gossiped behind their hands, a young woman caught her eye and smiled shyly before looking back down to her comic. Beyond them, Chiba slid past her in a succession of grey walls, lit windows, traffic jams and billboards and neon. An endless sea of dull, safe, ordinary little suburbs, hunched under a black winter sky.

And, she hoped, somewhere among the apartment blocks and convenience stores, deep within the sterile, foreboding bowels of a central Tokyo police station, Teiko Furuta would be sitting in a cell, contemplating life on the wrong side of a prison door.

Emi had never heard of Furuta until two nights ago, when Inspector Yagi of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had finally released his name in an official statement to the media. There was no reason for her to have ever known of the man, of course: Furuta was a thoroughly unremarkable specimen who, by all accounts, had led a quiet and blameless life in the northern suburbs of Tokyo. That was until, at the age of twenty-eight, he had been laid off from the architectural firm at which he had worked for three and a half years.

Perhaps it had been coincidence that Furuta’s dismissal took place just six weeks after Osamu Kodai had been taken on at the same firm, perhaps not. In any case, Furuta had weathered the humiliation of being ousted by a younger, more promising and more talented man for several days. And then, after a night’s drinking, he had forced his way into Kodai’s apartment, beaten the younger man semi-conscious and partially decapitated him with a kitchen knife.

And that, according to Yagi and his fellow officers, was the end of the matter. The murderer had been apprehended, interrogated, and had confessed to his crimes. The good people of Tokyo could once again rest safe in their beds at night.

Emi Takada did not feel safe.

Furuta had apparently been cornered after short, and relatively low-speed car chase. However, Emi had been unable to determine what kind of car he drove, or even confirm its colour. She had learned that certain items had been stolen from Kodai’s apartment, but whether or not a Yamaku yearbook had been among them remained a mystery. There seemed to be no indication he had burglarised Jiro Umeda’s house, or that he had ever fired a rifle through a window in Niiza. In fact, Emi had been unable to learn of any link between Furuta and herself, other than the fact that she and his victim had once attended the same high school.

She felt as though she’d been handed the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, only to discover that the piece was the wrong shape, the wrong colour, and came with a free mallet with which to pound it into position.

 

Rin had gone home two days previously, early on Wednesday morning, leaving her parents’ house only a few hours before Yagi’s statement. With Furuta in custody the police had handed ownership of the apartment back to her, and Lilly had arranged with Superintendent Isei to replace the broken door and window before she returned.

Emi had driven her back, but the journey had proved troubling. Rin had been nervous and uncommunicative, perching stiffly in the car seat and barely speaking at all. When they pulled up, she had asked Emi for her painkillers, and then got out of the car and begun walking to the door without another word.

“Hey, wait.” Emi swung herself out and trotted after her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Rin, don’t tell me that.”

Rin paused. “Thinking. Thinking very hard. Can’t think this hard and talk at the same time.”

“Okay. Ah, I guess.” She had known better than to ask what Rin was thinking about. “Listen… Am I gonna see you again?”

The woman had looked at her strangely, as if the question puzzled her. “Do you want to?”

“Of course I do!”

“Oh. Then yes. Not yet, but yes. Come back in two days.”

“Two days, right.” She’d watched Rin hook her keys out from a pocket, deftly unlock the door. “Are you sure you don’t want me to see you inside?”

Rin had shaken her head. “Best if you don’t.”

“But-“

“Emi.” Rin had leaned forward, touched Emi’s forehead with her own. “Please. Say goodbye Rin.”

It hadn’t been easy. She didn’t quite manage her own _Goodbye Rin_ until the door had already closed.

 

Rin’s apartment was reasonably close to Niiza station, and the roads Emi took to get there were busy and well-lit. Still, she kept her hand in her bag the whole way, and found herself waiting so cautiously at pedestrian crossings that she began to wonder if she was developing a phobia.

It was a relief to finally reach Rin’s block. She climbed the steps as quickly as she could, stabbed nervously at the entry button.

A few seconds later, the speaker crackled. “ _Who is it?_ ”

“It’s me.” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no-one was close, not for the first time that night. “Emi.”

“ _Are you sure?_ ”

“Pretty sure.”

Another few seconds passed. Emi stood and shivered, wondering if Rin had changed her mind. “Hey Rin? Look, if you’re busy I can always-“

The door buzzed. Emi pushed it open and stepped warily inside.

The corridor beyond was cool and quiet, as soundless as when she had arrived here with Lilly just five days ago. Emi stood where she was for a few moments, listening for any sign that the building was inhabited, then shook herself and moved on.

“Thick walls,” she muttered under her breath. “Gotta be.”

When she rounded the final corner she was relieved to see that Isei had been as good as his word. Rin’s door was closed, and completely intact; either repaired and repainted or replaced entirely.

There was a spyhole mounted in it now, a tiny glass fisheye glaring out at the corridor.

Emi walked to the door and tapped on it. As she did so she noticed a fragment of yellow tape still clinging to the doorframe. She peeled it off, folded it up and put it into her coat pocket.

She didn’t want Rin seeing that.

There was a metal ratcheting sound, and the door swung open a few centimetres, just enough for one big, bottle-green eye to peek out. “Hello.”

“Hi,” said Emi gently. “I brought cakes.”

“Do we need cakes?”

“Need and want are two different things.”

Rin stepped back and tugged the door open with her foot. “Most of the time this is true. Please come in.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why would I not be sure?”  

Emi went past her, watched Rin nudge the door closed as she slipped off her shoes. The surgical dressing was gone from her forehead, she noticed, and her bruises were smaller and paler. Rin’s wound was still stitched closed, but it looked to be healing. “Well, it’s been a funny few days.”

“If by funny you mean scary and happy and painful and sad all at the same time, then yes.” Two extra latches had been fixed to the inside of the door; Rin slipped one across with her chin, the other with her knee. “It has. But you being here makes it less of all those things except happy. I’m glad you came back.”

“Me too,” Emi told her, suddenly very relieved. She had been worrying that Rin might simply revert back to the way she had been before the attack, isolating herself, shutting Emi out. But, as usual, she had been underestimating her friend. “So how’s the thinking going?”

Rin appeared to ponder this. “I’ve reached the limits of the thinking I can do on my own. Luckily you’re here. What kind of cakes?”

“Those little ones you like,” Emi replied, taking a wrapped paper packet from her bag. “From the patisserie near the sports centre.”

“I love you, completely and forever.”

“Are you talking to me or the cakes?”

Rin gave her a small, sly smile. “Not telling.”

The apartment was as clean and well-ordered as when Emi had last seen it, if not more so. The workspace had been tided away; the rubber mat rolled and placed neatly under the window, the paints boxed, the backless chair and stand folded up and set aside. Rin had dragged bean bags into the space, and set up a little folding table between them.

That ugly russet stain was gone from the flooring, too.

There was a canvass on a tall wooden easel set up next to the window. Emi remembered it from before, but she was certain that it had been blank then, the surface primed but unmarked. Now it was a maze of colour, deep purples and crimsons and fleshy, unsettling pinks. A perfect, brilliant spot of white at gleamed at its centre.

She nodded at it as she unbuttoned her coat. “Is that finished? Can I…”

“If you like.”

Emi drew closer. It had been a long time since she had seen any of Rin’s work, and she had expected to see broader strokes, brighter colours. This, though, was precise, finely detailed, almost photographic in its intensity. There was no actual subject that Emi could name, just a morass of surreal, half-recognisable forms and structures, twisting, writhing, flowing one through the other in eerie procession.

It was simultaneously mechanical and organic, disturbing and beautiful, melancholic and queasily erotic. It was a landscape, a birth canal, an orgy from the depths of some sweat-drenched, liquid Hell. It was amazing.

Emi swallowed hard. “God almighty, Rin.”

“Hm. We had some fun, this one and me.”

“Wait a second…” Emi peered more closely at the canvass. What she had taken to be a white spot at the centre was actually a round hole, the width of her forefinger. Its edges were very slightly raised and ragged, as if something had punched its way through from the other side.

She recoiled. “Shit. Rin, is that…”

“Yup.”

“Isn’t that evidence?”

“Not anymore.”

Emi stared at her. _Here’s me,_ she thought, _shaking like a leaf every time I have to cross the road. Rin’s taken what that bastard did to her and she’s owned it. Turned it into art._ “What the hell were you thinking about while you were painting that?”

“Butterflies, mainly.”

“You painted that while you thinking about _butterflies?_ ”

“Or was it Shiina? No, I’ve been thinking about Shiina. And butterflies. Caterpillars. Embryogenesis and metamorphosis. Butterflies are the best animal, but I used to hate caterpillars. Isn’t that weird?”

Emi idly made one of her fingers arch like a caterpillar. “They’re kind of gross, so not really, no.”

“One time last year,” Rin continued, as if Emi hadn’t spoken at all, “I went out to look at clouds and fell asleep in the park, and when I woke up there was a caterpillar on my face. On my mouth. He wouldn’t get off. And I thought, if I make a fuss here with all these people playing and having picnics and being families I’ll end up in hospital again, this time with wires in my brain. So I got up and walked home and then screamed into a pillow. For a bit.”

“How long is a bit?”

“Maybe two hours. And then I thought, why am I screaming? A caterpillar is just a butterfly that’s waiting to become a butterfly. A butterfly _in potentia_. Screaming about it is silly, it’s like screaming about something that hasn’t happened yet and when it does happen it will be wonderful. Also, my throat is sore.”

“I’m not surprised.” Emi slipped out of her coat, went back to the entranceway to hang it up. “Two hours? Really?”

“After we met Shiina I started thinking about this again. Thinking very hard, I think. And I think…” Rin slumped back, quite suddenly, thumping down into a bean bag. “I think the reason I like butterflies is that they don’t change anymore. They’re all done with the changing. All they do is flutter and look nice and die, and that used to sound pretty good to me.”

Emi sat down opposite her. “You were scared of caterpillars because they do change.”

“Yes.” Rin nodded. “I’m glad you’re here, did I tell you that? Change is inevitable for a caterpillar, unless they die or get eaten by a bird. It’s something they’ve got to do. All this time I thought I was the butterfly, but I’m just a caterpillar, crawling along all green and squishy.”

“You think Shiina’s a butterfly?”

“Not yet. She’s still pulling her wings free. But she’ll be lovely when she’s finished.” A wicked little grin appeared on Rin’s face. “Shizune thinks so, anyway.”

“Ah, so that wasn’t just my imagination.”

“Nooo…” said Rin, stretching the word out into a long, slightly lascivious sound.

Emi chuckled. “Wow. You know, I used to pick that vibe up from Misha back at school, but I never figured Shizune was interested.”

“That was quite a long time ago.” Rin had that intensely thoughtful look to her again. The speed at which her moods altered never ceased to amaze Emi. “People change their minds. Some people change more than that.”

“It’s not compulsory, Rin.”

“I know. It would be very hard to enforce. But still.” She stood up. “I think I need to go somewhere.”

“What, now?”

“No. But soon. And quite far away.”

Emi didn’t very much like the sound of that. Perhaps she’d been too complacent about Rin’s state of mind after all. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not good at explaining things.” Rin was shifting her weight about, nervously rubbing one foot against the other as she stood. Then she stopped, closed her eyes. Emi saw her mouth the words _One, Two, Three_. “I don’t feel finished. I feel okay, I’m not sad and I don’t have bad dreams, but I’m still green and squishy. I have to go back to the chrysalis. I started to weave one but I never got the chance to finish because everything went wrong. I got pulled out too soon.”

Emi stood up, moved very close to Rin and put her hands up on her friend’s shoulders. “I like you the way you are.”

“I know.” Rin smiled. “It’s okay, maybe I‘m supposed to be squishy. And even if I’m not, maybe I’ll only be not squishy on the inside and you won’t notice the difference. But unless I try I’ll never know and I can’t not know. I need to show you something.”

She turned away, went over to the bookcase. Emi followed her, watching Rin trail a foot along the line of books, then stop at one and tip it back. “Let me,” she said.

“It’s heavy, mind your bad back.”

“You sound like my coach.” Emi lifted the book carefully. It was a big, solid volume, wide-format with hard covers and the kind of weight that spoke of several hundred glossy pages. She carried it over to the table and set it down. “ _Abandoned: Life in Dead Places_. Rin, what is this?”

Rin didn’t answer, just reached down to the book and opened it, began to flip through the leaves. As Emi had suspected, it was a collection of photographs, some in colour but mostly monochrome. There was very little text, often just a fine line of characters under a picture to denote where it had been taken and who by.

Page after page flopped by, and on every one Emi saw peeling walls, littered floors, broken windows and sagging ceilings. Cars reduced to rusted skeletons by time and fire, sprawls of graffiti, plants growing through window frames and up through cracked concrete. Every image crystal clear, painfully detailed. Dozens upon dozens of empty, abandoned buildings in all their faded, tragic beauty.

“Here,” said Rin. “This is where I started to become me.”

“Oh my God…” Emi dropped to her knees. Rin had stopped at an image of a long exterior wall, red brick under a grey stone balustrade. The wall was heaped with litter, plastic bags and dead leaves, and much of its paint had peeled away, but Emi could still make out the mural that had once covered it; an unmistakable chain of twisted human forms and grimacing faces.

“Rin, you can’t go back to Yamaku. It’s gone, remember?” She squinted at the line of text under the image: _Photograph by Hanako Ikezawa_. “They demolished it.”

“They started to, but then they had to stop because of the earthquake.” Rin knelt down next to her. “They’re starting up again soon, though. I want to go back while I still can.”

“I don’t think they’ll let you in there.”

“Hanako managed it.” Rin sat back on her heels. “And even if I can’t go in there, I can _be_ there. Do you understand?”

“This is really what you need to do?”

“Yes.”

Emi looked down at the photograph for a while, then glanced back to the apartment door, to the new lock and the heavy latches. She thought about the folded piece of tape in her coat pocket. “Hey Rin… You don’t have to do this on your own, do you?”

“That all depends,” Rin smiled. “How much cake can you carry?”


	15. Ghosts

_Naked, she stands at the edge._

_Her back is straight, her head high and arms spread wide. One foot reaches into the sharp night air. The slightest tilt forwards and gravity takes over, the slow arc, poised body pivoting around the other foot until that falls free as well and then the world is turning, the rushing wind lifting, caressing, tearing at her hair, sailing between outstretched fingers. Over and down, over and down._

_It feels like flying, until the ground comes up and-_

Shiina Mikado gasped, and blinked awake.

Her heart was racing, fluttering frantically in her chest. The transition had startled her; in one moment she had been whirling down through freezing air and in the next she was motionless, cocooned in warm darkness. For a few strange, disorientating seconds Shiina wasn’t entirely sure of where she was.

Far above her a smooth, vertiginous cloudscape sprawled out into the gloom, lit by sporadic flashes of bluish light. Her bedroom ceiling. She groaned and rolled her head forwards, feeling her neck crack alarmingly.

The room was in darkness. Her TV was still on, but showing a completely different programme to the one she’d been watching. She must have nodded off partway through.

After a long time, and with considerable effort, Shiina had been able to overcome many of the traits that had defined her early years. She was now able to keep the volume of her voice level and controlled. She didn’t laugh often, and when she did it was usually a proper laugh, quiet and self-effacing, hidden behind a hand. She had trained herself to respect the personal space of others. She could even, if she concentrated and took things slowly, climb several flights of stairs before getting dizzy.

But the compulsion to lie down and go to sleep as soon as it got dark just wouldn’t go away.

She sighed, switched the TV off with its remote, then swung her legs off the bed and sat up. In the sudden quiet she could hear traffic, a few cars in the street outside, and from downstairs the murmur of another television. A loud, barking laugh in response to some comedian’s joke or pratfall. Her father was still awake, at least.

Her phone was on the nightstand. She picked it up and tapped the power button to check the time, and was surprised to see that it was still early. She’d lost half an hour of her evening, at most.

That was good news. In a few minutes, she decided, she would go downstairs and make some tea to wake herself up. Maybe she would watch TV with her parents for a while, before returning upstairs to study until she got properly tired. And then…

She frowned, hugged herself. The dream had settled over her again, as fine and unsettling as a cowl of cobwebs.

Shiina didn’t need to be a genius to interpret what her subconscious mind had been telling her while she slept. The idea of renewing her friendship with Shizune both excited and terrified her in equal measure - one way or another, she was on the verge of stepping into the unknown. But there was memory involved too. Being re-introduced to Emi and the others had shaken her, disturbed the dark sediment of her mind, and things that had once settled deep had begun bobbing to the surface.

She stood, padded across the room to the window. The road outside was deserted, a faint winter mist hazing around the streetlamps.

That boy at school, she thought, Hisao Nakai. What had he felt on his final journey? Did he have time to relish the flight, or fear its end? He had been drinking heavily before he fell, so it would be comforting to believe that he hadn’t known what was happening before his skull had met stone. Still…

With a sudden, guilty start, Shiina realised that she could no longer remember what he looked like.

“How awful,” she breathed. Had it really been so long? She’d lost so much.

No, not lost, she told herself firmly. _Thrown away._ The act had been quite deliberate on her part. Every face she could no longer picture, every voice she couldn’t recall from those days was her own doing, her own fault.

She had discarded her past, because it was the only way she could face the future.

That reminded her of something she still needed to do. Shiina raised her phone again, swiped it into life and navigated to her contacts list, the numbers Emi had tapped in during that terrifying evening at Accelerando. She selected the first new name and hit the _Delete_ button.

_Are you sure you want to remove this contact?_ the phone asked her, an unassuming bar of characters in the centre of the screen. _Yes / No._

She looked it for a long time.

_You can’t ignore your past_ , a friend had once told her. _But you can’t let it hold you back, either._

Shiina took a long, deep breath. Maybe stepping out into nothingness wouldn’t be so bad after all. She hit _No_ and then tapped _Dial_ instead, put the phone to her ear.

The distant clicks and chirps of connection. Then: “ _Hello?_ ”

She spoke quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind. “Hello, Lilly?”

“ _Shiina, what a lovely surprise!_ ”

“I… I didn’t wake you, did I?”

She heard Lilly chuckle. “ _Not at all. To be honest I’m fighting my way through a rather large file of building regulations, so thank you for rescuing me._ ”

“You work really hard.”

“ _From what Shizune tells me, you’ve been working very hard too. And with good results. Congratulations_.”

Shiina found herself smiling. “Thank you… It wasn’t always like that, though. Did she tell you I failed all my exams?”

“ _She hinted that you might not have done as well as you’d hoped_.”

“Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it.” She turned, put her back to the window and leaned against the sill. “Lilly, listen… There’s something I need to tell you about that. Something I should have told you a long time ago.”

A slight pause. “ _What do you mean?_ ”

“I mean… Well, after I left school, things were really bad for me. I told Shicchan… I was in a bad place, Lilly. For a long time.”

“ _I’m so sorry to hear that. Shiina, are you sure-_ “

“No, I need to say this.” She squared her shoulders, the way she had seen Shizune do. “One night I… Wow, I got so drunk. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t talk to Shicchan about it all, it was too embarrassing. And I didn’t have any other friends from school, not really. I thought I was all on my own.”

There was no reply from Lilly. Shiina was very glad about that. “I did have one number, though. I don’t even know why it was on my phone, we weren’t really friends. But I knew she was nice. She didn’t have many friends either, so I thought maybe she’d know how I felt, at least.”

There was a soft sound from the other end of the line. A stifled gasp, perhaps.

“I didn’t even think she’d answer, but she did. We talked, for a long time. And then we started meeting up. She helped me so much, Lilly. She introduced me to her therapist, told me how to get the help I needed. Made me feel like I wasn’t on my own after all.” There were tears on Shiina’s face, even though she didn’t feel sad. She let them fall. “She’s been such a good friend to me. Even now, when she’s going all around the world, we still talk.”

Lilly was crying too, now. Almost silently, but unmistakably. “ _Shiina, please…_ ”

“Oh Lilly, she’s so beautiful now. And she misses you, she misses you every day. She’d never tell you, because she thinks it would hurt you, but I had to let you know. Emi’s found Rin again, and maybe I can be with Shicchan, even if it’s just for a little while. It’s not fair… I just wish I’d told you before.”

“ _No, no Shiina, it’s all right.”_ Lilly was speaking through muffled sobs. It broke Shiina’s heart to hear it, but to hear nothing would have been worse. “ _I understand. And thank you. Oh Shiina, you wonderful girl, thank you so much…_ ”

“She’ll be home again soon, Lilly.”

“ _I know. I know. Oh God_.” A long, shuddering breath. “ _Shiina?_ ”

“Yeah?”

“ _We’ll see you again, won’t we?_ ”

“I hope so. Goodnight, Lilly.”

“ _Goodnight. And Shiina… Don’t let Shizune slip away from you. Promise me._ ”

Shiina nodded. “I promise.”

The line went silent. Shiina closed her eyes, hugged the phone to her chest.

“ _Shicchan_ ,” she whispered.

 

[It must have been hard, telling her that,] Shizune signed to her, an hour later. [I don’t think I could have done it.]

[She deserved to know,] Shiina replied, when she was certain of Shizune’s words. Her internet connection could be choppy at times, and her laptop was far from new. It made Skype communication a little fraught, especially at the speeds both she and Shizune could sign now. [Besides, I don’t want to keep secrets any more. Whenever I think it’s the right thing to do I find out I’m wrong, in the worst way.]

[Secrets have their place. But not among friends, I think.]

Shiina blushed. She hoped her laptop’s camera wasn’t good enough to let Shizune see it. [Do you think they’ll be friends again?]

[I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so.] Shizune paused for a moment to adjust her glasses. They didn’t need adjusting, Shiina had always been convinced of that. It was just Shizune’s way of giving herself a second or two. [On the other hand, if you look at Emi and Rin, or you and I, you’ll see that there were events that spilt us apart. Lilly and Hanako just drifted away from each other.]

[There was that big argument they had in the cafeteria. That was horrible.]

Shizune nodded thoughtfully. [Yes, you’re right. But that might have just been pressure. Things were bad then, and Lilly was trying to mother Hanako a bit, I think. They forgave each other afterwards.]

[It wasn’t the same, though.] Shizune probably wouldn’t have picked up on that, but it had been plain enough to Shiina. [They didn’t like each other as much after that.]

[Such a long time ago.] Shizune smiled. [Let’s do all we can to make sure they find each other again, shall we?]

Shiina hid a grin. Shizune could never resist moving pieces around a board.

It was later now, and even more quiet. The downstairs TV had been switched off; her father would be listening to music on his headphones, his single, treasured, nightly glass of beer beside him, while her mother sat and read. There were no cars going past at all, now. In the city, the streets would be bright and full, the bars thudding with music and voices, but the suburbs were already settling down for the night.

Shiina knew she should have contacted Shizune as soon as she had finished talking to Lilly Satou, but the conversation had been too draining. She simply didn’t trust herself not to cry, or freeze up, or do something equally shameful as soon as she saw Shizune’s face on her laptop screen. Instead she had sat on her bed for a time, hugging her knees, forcing herself to mentally catalogue all those faces she used to see every day but had paid so little mind to. And then, when she had proved to herself that she had, in fact, forgotten more of them than she remembered, she had roused herself, washed her face until all trace of her earlier weeping was gone, and then walked downstairs to retrieve her high school yearbook from its place on her mother’s bookshelf.

Her study area was a little L-shaped desk in one corner of her room. The long arm was piled high with textbooks and study aids, with only a tiny cavity left among them for her laptop. She kept the shorter arm clear for reading, and it was here that she had sat for almost an hour, leafing through the wide, slightly faded pages of the yearbook, poring over the life she had once tried so desperately to leave behind.

Nakai hadn’t been in it, of course. He hadn’t made it that far.

[I’m sorry, Shiina, please wait one moment.] Shizune turned from the screen and got up, walked away from her desk. Shiina sat and watched city lights winking through the long windows at the back of Shizune’s office.

She glanced at the clock at the lower corner of her laptop screen. _21.12_. Shizune worked very late, it seemed, even on a Friday night.

A moment later Shizune sat down again. [Please forgive me. The last of the signers was just leaving.]

[So you’re all on your own now?]

[I am] A wicked grin appeared on Shizune’s face. [Finally, I have you all to myself.]

Shiina puffed her cheeks in mock indignation. [Shicchan! Are you thinking dirty things?]

[Are you?]

[I am not.] _Trying not to, anyway._ [My parents are right downstairs.]

[Then I’ll be good. For now.] Shizune nodded to the side. [I have to say I’m a little surprised to see you still have that.]

“Hmm?” Shiina looked to her left. [Oh, my yearbook! Mom insisted I keep it. I was just trying to remind myself what everyone looked like.] A sudden thought struck her, and she held the book up, flipped it to the correct page. [It’s okay, Shicchan, no holes!]

Shizune giggled silently. [If you were going to start sending death threats, I know you’d be smart enough to copy the pages and not cut up the book itself. Our hooded friend has made a nice piece of physical evidence for when the police finally catch him.]

Shiina set the book down. [You don’t think it’s this Furuta man, then?]

[No, he doesn’t fit at all. At best, I’d say that our tormentor was inspired by Furuta. Maybe he saw news reports of Kodai’s murder and decided to jump on the bandwagon, but that’s all.] Shizune paused, her fingertips tapping rapidly together. [In fact, the more I think about it, the more I start to consider the possibility that our man is an idiot.]

That wasn’t what Shiina had expected at all. [How do you mean?]

[Well, now we can exclude Kodai from his list of crimes, let’s look at the facts. He attempted to run over an unsuspecting woman who walks on two prosthetic limbs, and missed. He fired a rifle at Rin Tezuka from point-blank range and barely clipped her. He’s used easily traceable materials to create his death threats and as soon as he caught a glimpse of Saki Enomoto’s husband he ran away like a dog.]

[Saki’s husband used to play baseball, I’ve seen him on TV. He’s huge!]

[In which case, that might be the only smart thing he’s done.] Shizune sat back, swivelling her chair slightly back and forth. [We all watch TV and read books and expect killers to be criminal masterminds, but that never happens. Mostly they’re just stupid, small, pathetic people. Cowards lashing out because they don’t know any better. I have my issues with the police, but I feel for them, too. Most of what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis is just stupidness.]

[Maybe,] Shiina replied. [But isn’t it like what they say about terrorists? We have to be lucky all the time, but he only has to be lucky once. Rin and Emi nearly died, Shicchan.]

[I know, and that frightens me. If this man is as stupid as I think he is, he’s probably too dumb to stop.]

[It scares me too.] Shiina turned to flip the book closed. She lifted the long red cover of it, letting the pages flop over. Grids of faces slid past, maps and photos of the school itself, lists of awards and special thanks and sporting achievements. The fleeting formative years of her life, reduced to a few dozen faded pages bound in faux red leather.

She shut the book. Frowned down at it for several seconds, then turned briefly back to the screen. [Sorry, Shicchan, can you hold on one second?]

She didn’t wait for the reply, just opened the cover again, flipped past the frontispiece and the index, found the page she thought she had seen and drew her finger down it. “That’s so weird…”

Something flickered at the corner of her vision; Shizune was waving frantically at her. [What are you looking at?]

[Here.] She lifted the book up, held it open in front of the camera. After a moment or two there was a sharp snapping sound from the laptop’s speakers. She took the book down to see Shizune shaking her head.

[Your camera’s not clear enough, I’m just seeing a big white blur.]

[Oh, sorry.] She set the book down on her lap, put her finger to the name that had drawn her attention. [There’s a bit here for special thanks. You know, for people who worked at the school who weren’t teachers? The guy at the top of the list is somebody called Kotaru Umeda.]

[Umeda? The owner of the rifle was Jiro Umeda.]

[It’s probably nothing. I mean, lots of people are called Umeda.]

[Yes, but how many of them worked at Yamaku?] Shizune turned slightly away, began to tap at what must have been another computer. [Kotaru Umeda was the senior caretaker at Yamaku, right up until it closed.]

Shiina made a face. [Aw, come on, Shicchan. The caretaker? What is this, a cartoon?]

[He would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for us pesky disabled kids.] Shizune shook her head. [No, he doesn’t fit either. He’d be too old, don’t you think?]

[He must be, you’re right. But…] Shiina’s hands froze. She stopped signing, rubbed the back of her neck nervously instead. [No, I’m being stupid, Shicchan, I’m sorry.]

Shizune gave her a warning look. [Don’t ever call yourself that again, Shiina. And tell me what you were going to say.]

[Well, we thought that the old man didn’t report the burglary because he’d get in trouble for having the gun, right? What if that wasn’t the reason? What if he didn’t report it because he knew who’d done it and didn’t want to get _them_ into trouble?]

Shizune was staring at her. A slow smile spread over her face. [Shiina Mikado, if only you knew how bad I want you right now.]

[ _Shicchan!_ ]

[I’m joking. No, I’m not joking. Just tell me you don’t have plans for tomorrow.]

[Nothing I can’t cancel.]

[Good. Because I’m going for a little drive in the country, and I’d very much like you to come along.]


	16. Plus ça Change

A mist came down, on the morning that Emi Takada left Tokyo for the last time.

It formed just after midnight, fine and pale, brushing at the tops of the tallest skyscrapers, its grey fingers teasing through radio masts and cellphone antennae. During the early hours it became bolder, caressing its way downwards, and by the time Emi’s alarm woke her it was spreading brazenly into the streets. Emi looked out of her bedroom window to find the road outside transformed; the buildings opposite her rendered as flat and dimensionless as paper cutouts, the streetlamps hazed into eerie globes of amber light.

It was still there by nine-thirty, as she walked along the station platform with Rin. “What is this, Silent Hill? I thought it would be gone by now.”

Rin seemed to be trying to look everywhere at once. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s freezing.” The platform was crowded. Emi noticed a clear spot next to an information board and made her way towards it. “Let’s wait here.”

“Why here?” Rin nodded along the platform. ”Is here better than there?”

Emi put her suitcase down. “It’s closer, and this thing weighs a ton. My arms are killing me.”

One of Rin’s eyebrows went up, very slightly.

“Remind me of that look next time you complain about getting your toenails cut.” Emi glanced enviously at Rin’s luggage. The woman had somehow compressed everything she needed for the trip into a single black duffel bag, which was hooked over her left shoulder. “It’s my own fault, I always pack too much.”

“Why didn’t you get one with wheels?”

“I’ve _got_ one with wheels. But it’s the case I went to Korea with, it’s way too big for today. This is my small case.” Emi glared at it. “My small, really heavy case.”

“I’ve probably got the same amount of stuff as you.” Rin shifted her weight to the right, as if settling the bag more comfortably. “But you look nice, so your clothes need to be folded up so they don’t get squished and you keep looking nice. I don’t look nice so it doesn’t matter if my clothes are squished or not.”

“Who the hell said you don’t look nice?” scowled Emi.

“Mirrors, mostly.”

She reached up and put her fingertip on the end of Rin’s nose. “They’re lying.”

“If that makes me sneeze you’ll regret it,” Rin smiled. “Do you think Lilly will get here soon?”

“I hope so.” Emi peered around, wishing she was about a half-metre taller, or at least standing on a box. The early rush was already past, but the platform still seethed with passengers; business travellers working the weekend, families on day trips, shift workers and sightseers and bewildered little knots of foreign tourists. It was almost impossible for her to see any distance at all. “No sign of her yet, though.”

“I’m glad she changed her mind.”

“Yeah,” Emi said quietly. “Yeah, me too.”

It had been Rin’s idea to invite Lilly Satou on the trip back to Yamaku, but when Emi had called to ask if she was free Lilly had initially declined. While the idea sounded charming, she had said, the past few days had already eaten too far into her work schedule. Perhaps another time?

Later that night, though, just as Emi was preparing to leave for home, Lilly had called back - she had apparently been wrong about her workload and, if it was no trouble, she would very much like to accompany Emi and Rin to Sendai. Her secretary would arrange the ticket reservations.

Emi could tell that Lilly had been crying, but hadn’t said anything about that. The sudden reversal had been perplexing enough. And, if she was honest, the thought of having Lilly at her side while Rin attempted to metamorphosize was an enormous comfort. For no reason she could adequately name, Emi’s stomach had been a knot of apprehension ever since Rin had shown her the photos of Yamaku.

There was a soft chime from somewhere above her, and recorded voice. “ _The Yamabiko 133, Tokyo limited stop to Sendai will leave in fifteen minutes.”_

“Hope this damn mist goes away,” Emi grumbled. “They might slow the train down if it doesn’t.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Depends how long you want to spend at Yamaku, I guess.”

Rin looked pensive. “I don’t know how long I’ll need. It might be a minute or two or it might be a thousand years, I’ve never done this before so I can’t say right now.” She tilted her head slightly, as if pondering the implications of spending a millennium wandering around a demolition site. “But seeing how you need to get back to work on Monday it had better be around twenty-four hours. Hello Lilly.”

“Hm?” Emi turned to follow Rin’s gaze, in time to see Lilly Satou emerging from the crowds behind her.  She was dressed in a rather beautiful russet-coloured coat and matching scarf, and wheeling a compact silver suitcase along behind her.

At her side, his hand on her arm to guide her, was a tall, sandy-blond European man.

Emi had never seen him before. She would have remembered if she had; the man was strikingly good-looking. “Wow,” she breathed.

Lilly looked momentarily puzzled. “Um, hello?”

“I… I meant wow, what a lovely coat!” Emi laughed nervously, feeling herself going scarlet. “Who’s your friend?”

“Ah.” Lilly hid a smile behind her hand. “The coat, of course. And this is Marcus, my assistant. Marcus, these are my friends Emi Takada and Rin Tezuka.”

“I am pleased to meet you,” Marcus said, bowing precisely. His Japanese was good, but very formal and heavily accented. “I have heard many things about you both.”

“Have you?” said Rin. “That’s a worry. Who from?”

Emi elbowed her in the ribs, very gently. “So Marcus, will you be coming with us?”

“I apologise. No, I will stay in Tokyo.”

“Aw.”

Marcus turned to Lilly. “Miss Satou, please enjoy your journey. Contact me if you need anything at all. Remain safe at all times.”

She patted his hand. “Thank you, Marcus. I’ll call you as soon as I return.”

He bowed to her, and then smiled and said something, quietly, in a language Emi thought was probably English. She didn’t hear it properly, but it made Lilly giggle.

Another couple of bows to Emi and Rin and he was gone, weaving quickly away through the crowds. “You sly girl,” grinned Emi, watching him go. “You never told us you had a PA.”

“You never asked,” smiled Lilly. “And you can both stop looking at his backside now.”

 

Emi couldn’t let it go. As the train accelerated smoothly away from Tokyo Station she put her elbows on the little table between her seat and Lilly’s, rested her chin in her hands. “So. Marcus…”

“…has a husband waiting for him in England.”

She slumped. “God damn it.”

“My my,” Lilly chuckled. “Shall I get some water to put out that fire?” She folded her hands on the table. “And technically, Marcus is the office assistant, not my personal one. I don’t quite merit that kind of budget.”

“I should get a Marcus,” said Rin. “He could do my invoices and help me with hats.”

“He’s a very efficient young man,” Lilly replied. “You can thank him for this seat upgrade, among other things.”

 _Yeah_ , thought Emi. _Him_ _and your scary evil credit card_. “So what did he say to you back then? My English is lousy.”

Lilly coloured slightly. “He said to beware of ghosts.”

“Oh, so Yamaku’s haunted as well, now?”

“Just the usual internet horror stories.” She sighed. “Any empty building gains them. Floating lights at night, mysterious noises, shadowy forms prowling in the early hours…”

“I’d quite like to go home now please,” said Rin, in rather a small voice.

“That was fast.” Emi smirked. “Have you been watching _Grudge_ movies again?”

“There was a marathon.”

“Well if you get nightmares, don’t think you’re sleeping in my bed tonight.”

Rin leaned against the window and closed her eyes. “Another plan foiled.”

Beyond the woman’s tousled head the city was already beginning to blur, mist-shrouded buildings sliding past her and away, vanishing into the damp grey distance as the train gathered speed. Rin and Lilly were in the two front-facing seats, Lilly by the aisle, but Emi had never been troubled by travelling backwards on public transport. In a way she preferred it, although the notion was strangely at odds with her usual need to be out in front, setting the pace.

Perhaps, she thought idly, there was a part of her that, if it wasn’t entirely in control, didn’t want to see what was coming. “Lilly? Listen… I don’t want to stick my nose in, but is everything okay with you?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Emi found that she was tapping her fingertips together, and forced herself to stop. “When you called back last night you sounded kind of upset. That’s all.”

Lilly sat quiet for a moment, an uncertain look on her face. “I spoke to Shiina Mikado,” she said finally. “She called me, not long after you did.”

“Really? What, is something wrong?”

“No, not at all. Just something she needed to get off her chest, I think. But, well…” She smiled sadly. “Let’s say that our conversation brought the past into sharper focus than I might have liked.”

“So that’s why you changed your mind.”

“In a way.” Lilly nodded. “I won’t lie to you, Emi, the idea of going back to that place frightens me. But the truth is that, just like Rin, I have unfinished business there.”

“Got some ghosts of your own, huh?”

“I made mistakes, back then…” Lilly’s voice was barely a whisper, almost lost in the rushing murmur of the train’s progress. “I need to remind myself of them, properly. If I do that, I may even have a chance to correct them before it’s too late.”

Emi shivered. Rin was bolt upright in her seat, looking nervously at Lilly. _It’s okay,_ Emi mouthed at her.

Then: “Lilly? Is there anything we can do?”

“You’re already doing it.” Lilly took a deep breath, then smiled and turned her head away. “Emi, I apologise. There’s nothing wrong. And please forgive my little moment of melodrama, I’m never quite myself after an early start.”

“Sure,” Emi said, as reassuringly as she could. She could tell that Lilly was faking the smile – there was something seriously bothering her, but she was doing her best not to let it affect anyone else.

 _Some things just don’t change_ , she thought. But for Lilly’s sake, she would keep up the charade. “Still not a morning person, then.”

“Far from it. On a brighter note, I have to say I was pleased to hear from Shiina again. I wasn’t sure we would.”

“Well yeah. I kind of got the feeling that she couldn’t get away from us fast enough that last time.”

“To be fair, it was rather an unusual situation. And the first time she had seen any of us for some years. I get the impression that life hasn’t been especially kind to Shiina since we left school - I wouldn’t blame her for being wary of re-opening old wounds.”

“Being friends with people is hard sometimes,” said Rin.

“Are you saying I’m hard work?” Emi pouted theatrically. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Rin stuck her tongue out. “It’s easy when you’re at school. It’s like grass, you don’t have to do anything and it just keep growing. But as soon as you leave and get a job and keys and bills it stops being grass and starts being a plant in a pot. You have to water it and put it in the sun and sing to it or it goes brown.”

Emi’s eyebrows went up. “Sing?”

“Show tunes, mainly.”

“You haven’t even got any pot plants!”

“Of course I haven’t.” Rin stared at her as if she was pointing out the most obvious thing in the world. “I can’t sing.”

“If we’re talking about failing to nurture friendships, I’m more guilty of that than anyone.” Lilly ran a hand back through her hair, an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. “If Shiina has been through as hard a time as I suspect, gaining her trust might require some rather special handling.”

“We can do that,” said Rin. “We’re nice people. We’ll look after her, won’t we?”

Emi winked at her. “Great. Another mouth to feed.”

 

The mist that had enveloped central Tokyo seemed content to stay there. As the train raced away from the city Emi watched its vapours thin and fade, the buildings it revealed becoming lower, the spaces between them wider.

The sky was blue by the time they passed Omiya.

As the view from the windows grew clearer, the mood inside the carriage seemed to lighten in response, and the conversation turned away from the ghosts of the past and the demons of recent days. Instead, they spoke of more pleasant things; their homes and their dreams and the small, silly, entirely inconsequential details of their lives that are of no interest to strangers but endlessly fascinating to friends.

Rin told them about her work with a small group of independent artists based around Harajuku, and her plans to exhibit with them before the New Year. Emi talked about her dreams of qualifying for the Tokyo Paralympics, and about an apartment she had seen near Niiza and which of her list of indulgences she would have to give up in order to afford the rent. And Lilly spoke of Scotland; of all the ways in which it differed from Japan, and those in which it was strikingly similar. She talked about its beaches, the feel of cool sand between her toes, warm sunshine and scouring storm winds. The history of the place, the ageless solidity of its cities and its stones.

She talked for a time about her sister’s complicated love life, her mother’s attempts to write a book, her father’s funeral. And then, when it became clear that Lilly’s need to be alone with her thoughts was outweighing her desire to speak, Emi just sat back and watched the roads narrow and the hills rise red and gold, and tried to shake off the feeling that she was racing headlong towards a gathering storm.

 

Rin’s original plan was to change trains at Sendai and take a local service into the little town that clustered below Yamaku. Marcus, however, had worked his magic on that part of the expedition, too; Emi’s phone chirruped as soon as she stepped out onto the platform, announcing that it had received confirmation documents from a car hire office just a hundred metres away. Within minutes the three women were climbing into a crimson Mazda roughly twice the size of Emi’s little blue Toyota compact.

Emi sat in the driver’s seat for a while, just looking around the interior of the car and marvelling. “So many airbags…”

“This is a lovely car,” said Rin. “I love your car but this is really nice. Can I drive it?”

Emi pretended to consider the question for a while. “I’m gonna have to say no.”

“Give me two reasons why not.”

“You’ve got no license and no sense of direction.”

“This is true,” Rin sighed. “I get lost sometimes.”

“If I recall correctly,” said Lilly, fastening her seatbelt, “you once spent an hour trying to get out of the school cafeteria.”

“It was forty-five minutes, and that wasn’t my fault. They’d moved all the tables.”

“It wasn’t all the time.” Emi was adjusting her seat forwards. She needed it set at a precise distance for her legs to work on the pedals. “But I’ve got to admit, whenever you went off to the Worry Tree I wondered if you were ever going to make it back again.”

Lilly frowned. “The Worry Tree?”

“Yes,” Rin replied. “It’s a tree you go to when you’re worried.”

“And do you tell your worries to the Worry Tree, is that it?”

Rin looked slightly puzzled. “You can if you like, but I very much doubt it would be listening.”

Emi saw the expression on Lilly’s face, and decided to cut in before things got any more perplexing for her. “It’s more about the walk,” she said. “It doesn’t even really matter which tree, right Rin?”

“I _does_ matter which tree,” Rin told her. “It’s very important. It’s just never the same tree twice in a row, that’s all.”

Lilly rubbed the bridge of her nose. “If we substitute _worry_ for _confusion_ , I think I’m in need of a small forest.”

“I’m in need of lunch.” Rin clicked her own seatbelt in with her right foot, then slipped back into her sandal. She was wearing socks with individual toes; a novelty item for most people, but for her a necessity in the colder months. “Is anyone else hungry? We should eat something.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Emi turned the key, felt the bass vibration of the Mazda’s big engine thrill up through her spine. “Let’s go see if Yuuko’s still around.”

 

The Shanghai Tea Room was gone, of course. In fact, from what Emi could see, it hadn’t existed for a long time.

At some point in the past its frontage had been almost entirely torn down and replaced; pale plaster and dark wood sliced away, aluminium framing and plastic signboards fixed over the wounds. In turn, this too had been abandoned and left to fade. Closed down and locked and emptied, its surfaces bleached and crazed by the sun, its glass cowering behind steel security shutters.

Even those were corroded, laden with dust. Emi sighed, leaned back against the side of the car. “Well, this sucks.”

“It never had very many customers,” said Lilly sadly. “I suppose once the school closed, it simply became unsustainable. Poor Yuuko, I wonder where she is now?”

“I hate this.” Emi wrapped her arms around herself. “Is everything different, now? Hasn’t _anything_ stayed the same?”

“My hair, I think,” said Rin. “That’s about it.”

“Time makes fools of us all,” Lilly whispered. “What is it called, Rin? The tendency for things to fall apart.”

“Entropy.”

“Yeah?” Emi glowered at the shutters. “Well entropy can kiss my ass. I’m sick of it.”

“I have the feeling you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the next few hours.” Lilly moved closer to her, fingertips brushing the edge of the car roof. “What remains of Yamaku will be in far poorer repair.”

Emi nodded. “I guess. But we probably won’t get close enough to…” She trailed off. Her bag was vibrating against her side, and music, jarringly cheerful, was issuing from within. “Hold on, I’ll just get this.”

She pulled out her phone and swiped the screen. “Hello?”

“ _Emi?_ ”

“Hey Shiina! Great to hear from you!”

“ _I’m really sorry, Emi, I’m not disturbing you, am I?_ ”

“No, not at all. Rin and Lilly are here with me. Lilly’s waving, Rin’s sort of bobbing about and grinning.”

She heard Shiina giggle. “ _Say hi for me. Listen, Emi, I know you’re heading back to our old school today._ ”

Emi frowned slightly. “How’d you-“

“ _Shizune got in touch with Lilly’s office to tell her something, and a really nice English man told us you were on your way to Sendai._ ”

“Oh, Magic Marcus.” Of course he would have known Shizune, from all the times her firm had worked with the Foundation. He’d not have been so free with Lilly’s whereabouts otherwise. “Yeah, Rin wanted a look at the place before they finished knocking it down.”

“ _That’s going to be so sad_.”

“Tell me about it. We’re in front of the Shanghai right now, you know that tea shop? Looks like it got turned into a pizza place about a million years ago, and even that’s closed down.”

“ _Aw no! They used to do the best parfaits there… Oh, wait a second_.”

There were a few moments of silence. Emi caught Rin’s eye and shrugged, then realised that Shiina was probably talking to Shizune. She would have had to set the phone down to do that. “ _Sorry Emi-chan, back now. Shicchan was just telling me to focus._ ”

She chuckled. “Thought so.”

“ _Listen, Emi? You won’t believe this, but we’re pretty close to you right now!_ ”

“You’re kidding.”

“ _No, we’re in a town called Murata, it’s about half an hour away. We found out something interesting, you know, about these letters and stuff? So we drove up to investigate_.”

“That’s quite a hike,” said Emi. Driving from Tokyo would have taken Shizune at least four hours, and she and Shiina wouldn’t even have been able to talk on the journey. “Shiina, I don’t like the sound of you two playing detective. What if you run into trouble?”

“ _We’ll be okay, Emi-chan. Shizune’s office knows where we’re going, and we’ll call the police if anything looks funny_.”

“Text me the address too.”

“ _Sure. And when we’re done, do you maybe want to meet up later? We could have a meal. Maybe I won’t be so scared of everybody this time_.”

Emi couldn’t help smiling. “That would be fun. Call me when you’re finished being Miss Marple.”

“ _I will, Emi-chan. And you all be careful too!_ ”

“Always. See you later.” She took the phone from her ear and looked over at Lilly. “How much of that did you get?”

“Enough to be concerned.” Lilly brushed her watch face. “Perhaps we should begin making our way up,” she said, very quietly. “The sooner we’ve said our goodbyes to this ruin, the happier I’ll be.”

“Me too.” Emi turned, and noticed that Rin had crossed the street. “Hey, don’t wander off!”

“I’m not wandering.” Rin stopped, tilted her head back. “It’s there.”

Emi brushed Lilly’s shoulder, then trotted over to where Rin stood. “Where?”

“I’d point it out but I can’t do that, so you’ll just have to look.”

“You’re taller, I’m not sure I’ll see it.” Emi cupped a hand over her eye to shield them from the sunlight, and squinted upwards, following the direction of Rin’s steady gaze. And there, far uphill, among the green of the pines and the red and gold of the zelkovas she could see stark edges; brick and stone and the bright yellow glitter of great machines.

Her heart juddered in her chest. “Damn,” she whispered.

“We should go soon. Before it starts getting dark.”

“Not still worried about ghosts, are you?”

“Yes,” said Rin. “Also rats and broken glass and mud and spiders and security guards.”

Emi squeezed her shoulder. “You don’t have to go any further if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” said Rin. “But I do have to.”


	17. Out of the Labyrinth…

“ _You have reached your final destination,_ ” said the satnav, as a sudden deceleration tugged Shiina Mikado halfway out of her seat.

The Mercedes swung to the side of the road and jerked to a halt. Shiina rocked back – Shizune drove in a manner that might politely be described as _decisive_ – then looked around, slightly puzzled.If, as the satnav’s voice and screen were insisting, she had reached the end of her journey, then it certainly wasn’t a particularly impressive one.

They had stopped on a narrow country track barely two cars’ width across. Ahead of her the road curved to surround what looked like a small patchwork of fields; dark furrowed soil with forest beyond, a distant scattering of pale blocks that could have been houses or storage sheds. To her left the ground came up into rocky hillside, stones and scrub rising under sparse trees.

It wasn’t until she looked between the tree boles that Shiina saw dark wooden walls, and the framed glitter of glass beneath roof tiles and hanging branches. A metal signpost on the far side of the road swung gently. _Peach Tree Hills Road Stop_.

She touched Shizune’s arm, then pointed. [Shicchan? Is that the place?]

Shizune squinted through the windshield, and nodded. [I think so.]

[We shouldn’t park here.] Shiina looked back over her shoulder, but there were no other cars behind, just a narrow thread of brown road stretching back towards Murata. She could still see a few rooftops there, poking up from between trees. Houses out on the town’s edge. They hadn’t driven far.

[It’s just for a moment. I wanted to talk to you before we go in.]

Shiina turned around in her seat to face Shizune. [Okay.]

[I need to be certain you’re okay with this. I want you to tell me if you think we’re doing the wrong thing.]

It was unnerving, having Shizune ask her opinion in such a way. So few people wanted to know what Shiina thought about anything these days. [Well, we’ve come all this way. It would be silly to turn back now, wouldn’t it?]

[I mean it, Shiina.] Shizune looked more serious than Shiina could ever remember seeing her. [This isn’t the Student Council anymore. I don’t want to put you in any danger.]

Shiina smiled. [Shicchan, everything’s going to be fine. People know where we are, and I’ve got a good signal on my phone. Besides, I don’t think Mister Umeda’s going to trouble us, do you?]

[No, I don’t think we’ll be in any danger from him.] Shizune adjusted her glasses. [However, if we’re going to do this, we may still have to keep some parts of this conversation to ourselves.]

[Why?]

[You never know. So if I say _sunflower_ , that’s a code word. It means that the next thing I sign will be for you, and you only. Don’t translate it out loud, or if you think there’ll be a suspicious gap in the conversation then make something up. Can you do that?]

[Sunflower?] Shiina thought for a few moments. She had been automatically translating sign language to speech and back again for as long as she could remember. It was a reflex. Watching Shizune sign one thing and then saying something completely different wouldn’t be easy.

But she could see that there might be a need for it. She nodded firmly. [I think so. I mean yes, I can do that, Shicchan.]

[Thank you. Now, there’s just one other thing. It’s very important.]

[What’s that?]

Shizune looked quickly around, up the long curve of the road, behind them towards the town. And then, when she seemed satisfied that no-one was nearby she took Shiina’s face in her hands, leaned forwards, and kissed her, very gently, on the lips.

It was the briefest of touches, as much an act of friendship and genuine affection as of desire, and it made Shiina’s breath catch hard in her throat. [You shouldn’t do that, Shicchan.]

[No?]

[No.] She smiled and brushed Shizune’s fingertips with her own. [Not if you want me to be able to concentrate at all.]

 

While Shiina Mikado’s strange, sun-dependent sleep cycle might have been inconvenient at times, it had its advantages. The same mechanism that required her to reach for a triple espresso as soon as it got dark also had the opposite effect, and in recent times she was often awake and alert before the morning sun had cleared the horizon. So when Shizune’s imposing black Mercedes had pulled up outside her parents’ house at seven thirty that morning, Shiina had been standing ready at the door.

Not that she had slept, of course.

Caught up in the strange thrill of discovering the clue in her yearbook, she had agreed to accompany Shizune to Murata almost without thinking. It was only after saying goodnight and shutting her laptop down that the realisation of what she was proposing hit her, and she had spent the rest of the night curled up in a shivering knot of apprehension and self-doubt.

After all, that awful night at Accelerando was the first and last time she had spent in Shizune’s company since she had so shamefully turned her back on their friendship. And while the subsequent Skype conversations had been more relaxed and enjoyable than she had dared to hope, how, Shiina wondered, could Shizune possibly stand to be trapped in car with her for several hours?

How, indeed, could anyone?

By morning she had convinced herself that Shizune would cancel the trip as soon as she set eyes on Shiina again, or would arrive with a less objectionable signer already in tow. So she was honestly surprised when Shizune had emerged from the car alone, walked briskly up to where she stood and hugged her, very hard and for quite a long time.

Even so, it wasn’t until they were most of the way out of Tokyo that Shiina let herself believe Shizune wasn’t only able to tolerate her presence, but actually wanted her to be there. Shiina had no idea if she was forgiven – she hoped not, it would be far more than she deserved – or if Shizune had merely compartmentalised that part of their history for now. Maybe it didn’t matter. In the end, she decided, circumstance, however cruel, had given her back something that she thought was lost forever. 

And while she had breath in her body, she would keep her promise to Lilly and never it go again.

 

The hillside had been levelled off past the trees, scrub and soil gouged away to make a space just large enough for the Road Stop and its tiny car park. Shiina doubted there was room for more than two other vehicles alongside the Mercedes.

Not that a sudden influx of customers seemed likely at the moment. There was no other traffic on the road.

Shiina opened the car door and stepped gingerly down onto pale grey gravel, trying to make as little noise as possible. There was almost no sound here, just the dry whisper of trees, a thin metal creaking from the sign on the other side of the road. Even the quiet crunch of her footsteps seemed weirdly inappropriate.

The sudden thud of Shizune’s door made her physically jump. She glanced back, sheepishly. [Sorry, Shicchan.]

[Nervous?]

[A little, I guess.]

[Me too. And that’s a good thing. It keeps us on our toes.]

She nodded, then stood still and took a couple of deep breaths to try and calm her heartbeat. [It’s smaller than I thought it would be,] she signed.

Shizune was walking around the car to join her, unbuttoning her black coat. [The name makes it sound like a road station,] she replied, when her hands were free. [But I think it’s really just a convenience store and a couple of restrooms. If you want fuel you’re out of luck.]

They walked past a trio of vending machines towards the front of the Road Stop. A small wooden counter had been fixed to the wall there, facing the road; wrapped fruit and vegetables were lined up neatly on wire racks, probably produce from local farmers. Shiina had already eaten – they had stopped for half an hour in Murata, and Shizune had bought lunchboxes while Shiina called Emi – but she still licked her lips at the sight.

Shizune caught it, of course. She grinned. [Look at you, the healthy eater.]

[Fresh fruit can be yummy, Shicchan.]

[People keep telling me that.] Shizune moved past her to slide the door open, then stood aside and followed Shiina in. [I remain unconvinced.]

The interior of the Road Stop was very much as Shizune had surmised, a small, single-counter convenience store for travellers who didn’t want to go all the way into Murata. Shiina walked in past racks of magazines and newspapers, a microwave oven, a humming fridge stocked with sodas and iced coffee. She stopped at a counter topped with faded melamine, the windowed racks beneath it stuffed with candy bars and novelties.

There was no-one in sight, but a door behind the counter stood open. An office, Shiina decided.

“Hello?” she said, forcing her voice to raise above a whisper. “Excuse me?”

From inside the office, the thud and click of another door closing. Then a small woman in a dark blue tabard darted through, practically hurled herself at the counter. “Welcome to Peach Tree Hills Road Stop!”

A small cloud of cigarette smoke had followed her in. Shiina took an involuntary step back. “Uh, hello…”

The woman was older than her, perhaps in her late forties, with rather bushy hair surrounding a narrow, nervous-looking face. “Sorry to make you wait, we’re kind of short-staffed at the moment. Is there something specific you’d like? Or please feel free to browse…” She trailed off, staring as Shiina signed her words. “What’s that you’re doing?“

Shiina bobbed an apologetic bow. “I’m so sorry, I was wondering if we could speak to Masae Umeda?”

“That’s me.”

“Mrs Umeda, my name’s Shiina Mikado and this is Shizune Hakamichi. We spoke on the phone last night?”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” There a strange expression on Masae’s face, a wary, slightly embarrassed realisation. “You’re from the school.”

“That’s right. You said we could talk to you about your husband’s work there. Is it still okay?”

Masae folded her arms. “Like I said, we’re short-staffed. I was hoping Ryo would handle the counter for a while, but there’s no sign of him as usual. Maybe you could come back when we’re not so-“

“Busy?” said Shiina, rather surprised at herself.

For a long time, the only sound in the Road Stop was the hum of the fridge, and the high sad squeaking of the metal sign.

Masae sighed. “Fine,” she muttered, reached over to lift part of the counter. “Just promise me you’ll buy something on the way out.”

 

The office was just big enough for the three of them. Masae Umeda sat behind a tiny desk, almost hidden by an elderly beige computer monitor, while Shiina perched on a plastic chair in front of her. Shizune had taken up position on the edge of the desk, back to the wall, so she could see them both.

The external door didn’t fit very well; there was a cold draught coming in past it and hitting Shiina squarely in the neck. She did her best to ignore it. “This is a really nice place,” she said, as convincingly as she was able.

“Used to be.”

“Have you worked here long?”

“Too long. Sorry, what is it you’re doing, again?” Masae still seemed unsettled by Shiina’s signing. “Writing a book?”

“Not a book, exactly.” Shizune had come up with the cover story the previous night, before Shiina had phoned ahead to the Road Stop. “We’re making a history of Yamaku Academy. For, uh, a reunion we’re planning. It such was an amazing place, Mrs Umeda, and we don’t think the story’s ever been properly told.”

“Pretty sad story.” The woman frowned. “So are you gonna be writing this down?”

Shiina blinked. She hadn’t thought about that. “Um, I can’t write and sign at the same time, Mrs Umeda.”

Masae narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Okay…”

“Oh, wait!” She reached into her bag, took her phone out and tapped at it until the voice recorder came up. She set it down on the desk. “Sorry. I haven’t done this too many times, I keep forgetting.”

[Sunflower,] Shizune smiled. [Good thinking.]

“Well,” Masae muttered. “I guess that proves you’re not reporters.”

“Not very good ones, anyway.”

“Trust me, I’ve met enough of those assholes to know.” The woman’s expression softened slightly. “And I’ve worked here, oh, eleven years now. Used to belong to my first husband, I took it over after he died.” She ran a hand back through her hair. “Look, how do I do this? If I’ve got a question for your friend, do I ask her or you?”

Shiina smiled reassuringly. “Just talk normally. We’ll understand.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best. And if I screw up it’s just because I’m, well, not used to…” She made a vague gesture. “To this.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t think you’re a bad person, right Shicchan?”

Shizune shook her head. [Sunflower. Try to get her to talk about Kotaru.]

“Shizune says, ah, no, that’s okay, she’s kind of used to it.” Shiina shivered. Signing something that Shizune hadn’t said felt horrible, worse than dishonest. “Um, your husband, though. He worked at Yamaku right up until it closed, didn’t he?”

“And afterwards. One of the first people taken on, too.”

“He worked at Yamaku _after_ it closed?”

“Uh-huh. I mean, when the place finally went belly-up he was laid off, same as everyone else. But he got re-hired as site security, looking after the buildings until they got demolished.”

“Oh, I see. And when the demolition stopped because of the earthquake, did he keep doing that?”

“Mm.” Masae scowled. “I asked him not to. The money was lousy, and I could have done with the help here. He insisted, though.”

“Why was that?”

“Because he loved the place. He was devoted to it. He…” She closed her eyes, just for a moment. “Sorry. It’s still hard, you know?”

Shiina felt a chill that had little to do with the draught. According to what Shizune had been able to find out, Kotaru Umeda had walked out of his house on one warm night back in August, and never returned. It had been Masae who had found him, eventually, out in the woods with his wrists and throat cut.

He’d been there for a week. “It’s okay, Mrs Umeda,” she breathed. “Take all the time you need.”

“Thanks.” Masae squared her shoulders. “He said he had a duty. Even after the school closed, he couldn’t abandon it. Me, this place…” She gestured out of the office door. “None of it mattered, as long as he could still look after Yamaku somehow.”

Shiina didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything at all.

“Listen,” Masae told her. “I don’t want to sound like I didn’t understand. Okay? I did. I do. I know how important that place was. And it made him proud, just to be part of it. He used to keep everything they gave him, all the yearbooks… Whenever one of the pupils went on to do something, achieve something, he’d tell all me about it. He’d keep newspaper clippings, all kinds of crap.” She chuckled. “God almighty, he could bore for Japan. Used to drive me crazy.”

Shiina glanced over at Shizune. “Wow. I wish I enjoyed my job that much.”

“Guess you could say he lived for it.” The smile slid off Masae’s face. “I remember the day that boy died. When Kotaru came back that night, he was…” She shook her head slightly. “He knew it was all over, even way back then. He could see what was coming.”

“That the school was going to close.”

“Uh-huh. Did you know him? That boy, was he in your class?”

[Sunflower,] signed Shizune. [No, we didn’t.]

“Um, not really. I don’t think he’d been at Yamaku very long.”

Masae’s voice had dropped low. It was almost as quiet as Shiina’s now. “Kotaru blamed himself. Said he should have checked the fence up there, locked the door to the roof, put signs up… I told him, kids are gonna do what kids are gonna do, but he wouldn’t listen.” She looked away. “He wasn’t the same after that.”

A thought occurred to Shiina. “Did he get into trouble?”

“The police talked to him, but not seriously. They were too busy trying to pin something on that other poor kid who was up there. He got the worst of it.”

“Kenji Setou?”

“That’s the one. Kotaru had some clippings about him, too. Didn’t he join a band, or something?”

That was news to Shiina. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

“That’s gonna be a hole in your story, then.” Masae smiled sadly. “We had reporters poking around for a while. You know what it was like, you were right in the middle of it.”

“It was pretty bad.”

“But the worse it got, the more determined Kotaru was to see it through. When the place closed I thought, you know, finally he can let it go, be here with me, maybe even patch things up with Ryo, but it was too late by then. As soon as the chance came for him to go back, he jumped at it.”

Masae had mentioned that name earlier. Shiina had thought she’d been talking about an assistant at the Road Stop. “Ryo?” she asked.

“Ryoichi.” A shadow seemed to cross Masae’s face. “My son.”

Shiina found herself becoming very still. “Does Ryo work here with you?”

“I wish.” Masae fingers were knotting. “Most of the time I don’t even know where the hell he is. He can go missing for days at a time, worries the hell out of me. I mean, I called him today, I knew you were coming and I called him to watch the counter. Sure, he said. I’ll be there.” She spread her hands. “You see him?”

“Um, Mrs Umeda? Did Ryo and Kotaru get on?”

“God no. I mean, Ryo’s always been the quiet type, since before his father died, but he never liked Kotaru and I think the feeling was pretty much mutual. He used to spend more time with Kotaru’s dad than he ever did here.”

“Jiro.”

Masae’s eyebrows went up. “You’ve done your research. Yeah, that crazy old bastard. He’s half the problem, I’ll bet. Any time things kicked off between Kotaru and Ryo, he’d drive back there, hide out in the old man’s attic, listening to Jiro telling him shitty war stories.”

Shizune stood up. [Sunflower. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.]

[Me too, Shicchan.] An unholy cold crawling sensation was clambering up and down Shiina’s spine.  “Mrs Umeda? Ryo didn’t go to Yamaku, did he?”

“There wouldn’t have been a problem if he had, would there?” Masae puffed out an exasperated breath. “Any time he got into trouble Kotaru threw that right in his face. ‘Look at all these disabled kids, making something of themselves.’ That runner, you remember her? God almighty. When she won a medal, you should have heard them go at it.”

[Shiina, we need to leave.] Shizune had forgotten the code word and Shiina didn’t care. [I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think we’ve just walked right into the lion’s den.]

[I think you’re right.] Shiina got up from her chair. “Mrs Umeda, thanks so much for your help. You’ve been really-“

The door burst open, sending in a wash of freezing air. Shiina span around.

“There you are,” said Masae. “About damn time.”

A young man in a black hooded top stood in the doorway. He was tall, well-built, and staring at Shizune with a look of absolute horror on his face.

“Ryo,” whispered Shiina.

The man turned, scrambled away, the door slamming hard in his wake.

Before she knew what she was doing Shiina was racing after him. She wrenched the door open and ducked out, looked wildly around. The man had vanished, but there was a big, rust-spotted green car parked awkwardly alongside the Mercedes.

She took a step towards it, and then something flashed at the corner of her vision, whipping towards her from the shadows.

Pain exploded through her skull.

The world turned to light, to darkness, to a sickening red sludge that wheeled up and slammed into her face. Her fingers scrabbled in cold gravel, trying to get a purchase, to force herself up, but her arms were damp clay, heavy and cold and impossible to control. She fell again.

There was a scuffling sound, nearby but dulled, muffled, as though she where hearing it through thick cloth. She heard a short cry, an impact. Something heavy hitting the ground not far away.

Shiina moaned, gathered what little strength she still had in her, and raised her head. Opened one gluey eye.

What she saw made no sense. She was seeing through a slick crimson haze, shifting and oily. She could make out a few shapes; an ocean of gravel stretching away from her, the wheel of a car, a black stick of metal lying a few metres from her head, curved oddly at one end. A dark mass on the ground, a silent squirming thing, desperately trying to shield itself as the hooded man leaned over it, raining down blow after blow until it finally jerked and became still.

She reached out a hand towards the mass, but it was already being hauled up and out of her sight.

Darkness sluiced in from the edges of her vision.

There was a grumbling, a mechanical clatter. Shiina opened her eye again, saw the car wheel rolling towards her. She wondered, vaguely, if it wouldn’t be best to move out of its way, but the last of her strength was gone. She couldn’t even roll over. All she could do was watch as the clatter rose to a roar, and the wheel bore down.

Small, strong hands pulled at her, dragging her over and away.

Her world filled with sky, too bright to look at. And a face, mouth open, eyes wide, streaming tears. Masae Umeda was howling something down at her, over and over again, but the words were slipping past Shiina before she could grasp their meaning, slick and glittering, just fish in a murky, bloodied stream.

It was like listening to another language.


	18. ...Came the Minotaur

No-one spoke, on that final drive up to the school.

Emi Takada wasn’t entirely sure what had robbed her companions of speech. Apprehension, maybe, or the weight of their memories. Perhaps the sight of the Shanghai tea room standing so empty and defiled had stilled them. Whatever the reason, none of the three friends had managed more than a few words since getting back into the car. They made that slow, sad, sunlit journey in silence, up the winding mountain road, from the empty edges of town to the place where, in happier days, Yamaku Academy once stood.

Emi’s own reasons for staying quiet were mostly pragmatic. Driving the Mazda took all her concentration; the hire car was heavier and far more powerful than her beloved Toyota, and while it was a thrill to handle such a machine on level highways, on that steep, sinuously curving route up the mountain it was all Emi could do to keep from stalling on every corner.

Had she tried to talk and steer at the same time, she would probably have hit a tree.

So with her mouth clamped shut and her eyes narrowed against the glare, Emi had driven through flickering bars of light and shadow, the bright low sun stabbing at her through bare branches and blood-red leaves. And, quite unexpectedly, the higher she climbed the more lost in memory she became. It was as if her thoughts were reversing as the car surged on, taking her back to the times she would walk along this same road with Rin on their trips to the art store or the park, or jog down alone for no reason other than the joy of movement, the high gliding pleasure of outrunning her troubles, of leaving the bad dreams and the phantom pains swirling in her wake.

Then she rounded the road’s final curve, and the light faded. She had passed into shadow, hard-edged and artificial; a transition so sudden, so unexpected that she felt, for a few unspeakable seconds, as thought she had passed through a barrier between worlds. A membrane separating light from darkness, and a tragic, unfinished past from a future that was much, much worse.

 

It was just a trick of perspective, of course.

Standing outside the Shanghai, Emi had been able to see enough of Yamaku to convince herself she could simply walk up to the front gates and let herself in. Once level with the site, though, she had discovered that the school, or at least what remained of it, was walled off and entirely blocked from view. A safety perimeter had been erected by the demolition firm; hundreds of sheets of rough fibreboard, each one almost twice Emi’s height, screwed firmly onto fenceposts and painted an official-looking green.

Emi was making her way carefully along the line of them, with Lilly holding onto her left arm and her right outstretched to steady herself against the boards. The ground under her feet was treacherous; mud and sand and brick dust, churned up and hardened into a rutted, pitted moonscape.

She had parked the Mazda further down the road to avoid attracting attention, and was beginning to regret it. Her prosthetics didn’t function well on such an uneven surface, and her thighs were already beginning to hurt.

“Look at this,” she muttered, disgusted. “I didn’t know this would be here. Why couldn’t we see it from town?”

“Trees,” Rin replied over her shoulder. She was trudging along a few paces in front of Emi, had been since leaving the car. “Probably. Forests tend to have a lot of those.”

“You wanna walk home?”  

“Um. It’s a nice day, but maybe the train would be quicker.” Rin stopped dead, and swivelled to look at the boards. “There’s a gate here.”

“Locked, I assume,” said Lilly.

Emi was close enough to see it, now; two double-width boards fitted with massive metal hinges and drop bolts. When they were open, she guessed, they would probably leave a gap wide enough to admit a truck or some of the smaller construction equipment, which made her think there must be another entrance for the really big stuff.

This gate, however, was very far from open. “If by ‘locked’ you mean ‘wrapped up with a chain as thick as my arm’, then yeah.”

“That’s hardly surprising. But disappointing, all the same.” Lilly sighed, a sad little cloud of vapour in the cold still air. “We do seem thwarted at every turn, don’t we?”

Emi glared sullenly at the gate. “Guess we came a long way for nothing. I just hope Shiina and Shizune are having more fun than us.”

“Are you saying this isn’t fun?” asked Rin.

Despite her surroundings, Emi grinned. “More fun than I can stand. Just wait here a second.”

Lilly took her hand off Emi’s arm. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t think that gate fits together too well.” She had seen a thread of light between the boards. She took a careful step closer and pressed her face to the gap.

The fibreboard was rough and cold against her skin, and smelled musty, stale. The space between the two boards was no wider than her finger. “Ah, anyone got a ladder?”

“I’m not normally one to ask this,” Lilly said quietly. “But what can you see?”

“Not a lot. I think most of it’s already gone.” From what little she could make out, it seemed that the demolition site was less than half the original size of Yamaku’s campus. It was impossible to tell for sure, but Emi guessed that she was standing roughly halfway down what had been the tree-lined walkway leading up to the main building. “They must have moved the wall inwards once they knocked down the outer stuff.”

“I suppose they’d want to keep their machinery as far from the road as possible. Can you see the dorms?”

“They’re gone.” Emi twisted her face to try and get a better view, closed one eye. “That whole part of the campus is flat. There’s something on the ground instead, big slabs of concrete?”

“Foundations.” Lilly’s voice was closer now. “I believe a housing developer had purchased the site.”

“The main building’s still there, but not much else. Looks like they quit hallway through tearing up the auxiliary block. That’s a real mess.”

“Ah. So no chance of a swim, then.”

Emi chuckled, then spotted a familiar splash of colour. “Hey Rin! I can see your mural!”

There was no answer. Emi turned from the gap to see Lilly standing expectantly just behind her, slim white hands folded neatly around the handle of her cane.

She was alone. Emi looked quickly around. “Where the hell’s Rin?”

Lilly stepped back. “I heard her moving away, but then I was listening to you…”

“She’s wandered off again. God damn it.” Emi cupped a hand over her eyes and glared down the line of boards. The wall angled away from her a couple of dozen metres ahead. “Give me a minute.”

She paced away, as quickly as she was able on the ragged ground, keeping one hand on the wall.

As she reached the corner she slowed, peered warily around the rough painted edge. The line of boards continued away from her, an endless, monotonous procession of dull green wood and churned earth. To her left, between her and the forest, scrub and rubble and great stacks of building materials hemmed her in, a chaotic, looming funnel.

In the midst of this unappealing view stood Rin, quite still, facing the wooden wall.

Emi stalked towards her. “What the hell, Rin? Where did you go?”

Rin turned her head to blink lazily at her. “Right here.”

Suddenly, all the day’s disappointments, all its fears and failures coalesced into a hard, cold knot of anger behind Emi’s eyes. “Stop doing that!” she snapped. “Stop saying things that are true just to make me look stupid!”

“What?”

“And stop wandering off! What are you, six years old? This place is dangerous, and you left Lilly all on her own.”

“She wasn’t on her own. She was with you.” Rin looked puzzled. “She’s on her own now.”

“ _That’s not the fucking point!_ ”

Rin flinched, stepped back. Then her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry, Emi.”

_Oh, nice going, Takada_. “Rin, look, I-“

“This is my fault. I made you come out here with me and it’s all gone wrong. Nothing’s how it should be. I’m really sorry.”

“No, don’t say that.” Emi put a hand on Rin’s shoulder and squeezed it hard. “It’s me who should be sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I’m just…” She supressed a shiver. “I’m scared, Rin.”

Rin didn’t answer, but her head tilted slightly.

“It’s stupid, I know. But this place is freaking me out. You’re right, this isn’t like we thought it would be. It just feels _wrong_.”

“Then we should go home.” Rin nodded slightly, as if confirming something to herself. “Yes. If you want to go then we’ll go.”

Emi smiled. “Damn straight I want to. But we’re not going to, not until you’re done here. I know you need this, Rin. I’m not going to take it away from you just ‘cause I’m scared of…” She shrugged. “I dunno, ghosts or something.”

Rin’s eyebrows went up. “What, actual ghosts?”

“No, figure of speech ghosts.”

“Oh, that kind.” A tiny smile flickered across Rin’s face. “Thank you. Also, I’ve found out how to get in.”

“Wait, what?”

“There.” Rin nodded at the wall behind Emi’s shoulder. “Look at the frog.”

“The what now?” Emi turned, saw a large warning poster pasted across two of the boards. She had seen dozens of them on the wall already; faded and stained, barely-legible lists of grisly dangers and legal repercussions presided over by the demolition company’s incongruous cartoon mascot. A frog in a hard-hat. “Oh, okay…”

There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary about the poster Rin had pointed out. Then a tree moved behind her, the angle of sunlight shifting fractionally, and Emi saw the faintest thread of shadow appear on the paper. She reached out to it, trailed down the line with her fingertips.

The poster had been cut in two. Somebody had taken something very thin and very sharp, and drawn it carefully down the join between one board and the next.

“The screws are gone on one side,” Rin told her. “And there are marks down the edge, like it’s been pried open a few times.”

“What with?”

“I don’t know. A screwdriver? Maybe a crowbar.”

There was a faint tapping at the boards. Emi looked around to see Lilly walking quickly towards her. “Hey.”

“I thought you’d forgotten all about me.” Lilly was smiling, but she looked a little rattled. “Have you found something?”

Emi described the modified board to her. “Hanako got in to take those photographs, but that must have been a year ago, at least.” She watched Lilly’s long fingers explore the poster, the gouges in the edge of the board. “Does that feel like something she’d do?”

“I hope not,” Lilly breathed. “I’d hate to think of her becoming the kind of person who carries a knife.”

“Yeah, I kind of imagined her just climbing over.” Emi put her fingers into one of the gouge marks, gripped the rough edge of the fibreboard as hard as she could, and pulled.

The board resisted for a moment, then some minor obstruction gave way and the whole thing jerked a hand’s width towards her.

She’d been rather hoping it wouldn’t. “Oh shit.”

“Just because we can,” said Lilly, “doesn’t mean that we should.”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t?”

“Not necessarily.”

Emi squinted warily through the gap. “Your call, Rin.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Rin was shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other. “Um. Okay. On the minus side, it’s scary, it’s dangerous, it’s probably illegal. We could all wind up with a criminal record. And tetanus. And I refuse to rule out ghosts.”

“My my,” said Lilly. “That’s quite a compelling list, Rin. And on the plus side?”

“I can’t really give you a plus side right now.”

“But you want to go in anyway.”

“You don’t have to come in with me. You could stay out here where it’s safe.”

“What, and let you have all the fun?” Emi gripped the edge of the board and pulled it all the way open. “Let’s just hope they’re not the kind of ghosts that follow you home.”

 

Emi had expected the school’s main entrance to be locked, but it seemed that the demolition company considered their wooden wall security enough. The doors swung open as she pushed them, with only a faint groan of protest from the hinges.

The sound was small, but it echoed around the lobby for a long time.

Emi stepped through. “Okay,” she said, very quietly. “Now this is weird.”

“Why are you whispering?” asked Rin.

“Why are you _not_?”

“Such a strange feeling,” Lilly said. “Between us we must have walked through these doors hundreds of times. But never onto silence.”

“It doesn’t even look all that different.” Emi took a few paces into the lobby, hearing the soft crackling of her footsteps bounce and fade off into the gloom. There was grit on the floor, building sand and dry leaf litter around the entrance, as though someone had walked in with the stuff on their shoes. “Just sort of… Neglected.”

In a way, that made the sight even sadder. She could have accepted seeing the lobby in ruins, or as dilapidated by time as the structures in Rin’s book.  Shattered windows and plant-infested stairs would have been horrifying in their own way, of course, but that kind of shock was immediate, visceral. Easier to process, in the long run.

Entropy was, after all, the natural order of things.

Yamaku Academy’s lobby, however, looked almost untouched by its years of abandonment. The glass beneath the safety rails was grimed and dusty, but unbroken. The pale wood panelling along the central ramp was intact. Even the vast checkerboard painting, a source of utter bemusement to every Yamaku student, still hung in its usual spot on the left-hand wall.

None of the lights were on, but muted sunshine filtered in through the high strip of windows at the lobby’s far end.

“I can hear water,” said Lilly. “Something dripping. Are there holes in the roof?”

“Don’t think so.” Emi frowned, listening hard. At first she could hear nothing other than her own breath, the faint padding of Rin’s sandals as she wandered slowly up the ramp. Then, from somewhere to her right and quite clearly in the lobby’s echoing stillness, the soft tap of water on metal.

She moved over to that side of the ramp, leaning against the rail to peer around a pillar. “Just a water fountain.”

“Don’t drink it,” said Rin. “It’s ghost water. If you’re thirsty I’ve got a juice box in my bag that almost certainly isn’t haunted.”

Lilly had a puzzled frown on her face. “Wouldn’t the demolition company have turned that off?”

Rin shrugged. “Somebody must have turned it on again. Emi, I’d like to go upstairs please.”

“I thought you might. Lilly?”

“Hm? Oh, of course.” Lilly reached out, her left hand effortlessly finding a rail. She flinched.

Emi walked back to her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I believe so. It’s just…” She tapped her fingers nervously against the dusty metal. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would all still be so familiar.”

Emi took Lilly’s other hand. “You and me both.”

 

Rin led them upstairs. Emi was glad to see that she did so slowly, not moving on at her own pace but constantly looking back to make sure she and Lilly were all right. Luckily the stairs were as frozen in time as the rest of the building; of all the things that were making Emi nervous, at least coming to grief on loose masonry wasn’t one of them.

Once on the third floor they followed Rin past the main classrooms. Emi found herself slowing as she reached 3-4. She turned the handle, pushed the door open slightly. “Aw man. They didn’t even take the desks out.”

Lilly had paused next to her. “Everything’s as it was?”

“Almost.” She stepped into the doorway. “The blackboard’s gone. That’s weird. The rest of it, though…”

“Old school furniture has so little value,” sighed Lilly. “Trying to remove and sell it all would just cost the demolition company money. Cheaper to let it stay here and be destroyed.”

“There’s my desk,” said Rin, nudging Emi. “Next to yours.”

Emi chuckled. “They should sell those two as barely used, ‘cause you were always goofing off in the art room and I was running every chance I got.”

“What was your final score in English again?” Lilly put her hand to the doorframe, then turned, orientating herself back towards 3-2. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll stay here for a while.”

“Sure,” Emi said absently. She had spotted another desk she knew, two rows ahead of hers. Osamu Kodai had sat there. She supressed a shudder. “Yell if you need us.”

“I will _call_ , Emi dear. I never yell.” A sudden, rather wicked smile lit her face. “Well, only under very exacting circumstances.”

Emi watched her tap her way to the next room. “Why do I get the feeling she’s got a better sex life than me?”

Rin was at the door to the art room. She hooked it open with her knee. “Because everyone’s got a better sex life than you.”

“No fair,” Emi pouted, then followed her as she pushed the door open and went in. “That include you?”

“Not telling.” Rin padded between the long, six-drawered benches, avoiding a couple of stools that had been tipped onto the floor. She went to a desk near the window, perched on it and swung her legs up, put her back against the wall.

Emi lifted one of the stools and sat down, smiling across the room at her. “You used to eat your lunch here.”

“On occasion. And not usually at lunchtime. Up on the roof with you was more fun though.” Rin gazed out of the window, blinking a little. The corridor had been quite gloomy, but the art room’s big windows flooded the room with cool sunlight, despite the brick dust and the spiderwebs. “Did I ever tell you that? I should have told you that.”

“I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter.” Rin turned her head to fix Emi with a surprisingly intense gaze. “It matters a great deal. There were a lot of things I should have told you back then. But I was too squishy, so I didn’t say any of them. I…”

Her voice trailed off. She was silent for a long time, a pause Emi knew better than to interrupt.

Then: “I know it’s not easy, being my friend.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it is demonstrably true.” Rin was looking back out of the window again. “You’ve had a lot of practise, so you can make it look easy, but I know that it’s hard for you. I can’t do things friends are supposed to do.”

Emi folded her arms. “Like what?”

“I can’t talk about hair or clothes or music or movies, not the way most people can. I can’t talk about what I like about those things, even when I do like them. I don’t know the words for what I like about things.”

“I don’t think there _are_ words for what you like about things.”

Rin stuck her tongue out. “You saying stuff like that would have worried me, back when were here before. I would have thought you were a mind reader, or something equally sinister.” Her eyelids drooped, and she smiled. “I may have been ever so slightly paranoid, in those days.”

“And now?”

“Now I know I’m just not very good at knowing what people mean. Including myself.” She nodded. “Especially myself. Feelings are still something of a mystery. Like electricity and skeletons. I know that not having them would be bad, but I don’t really know what they’re like or how they work.”

“You’ve seen skeletons. That school trip. We went to the museum, remember?” Emi found herself grinning. “We were all freaking out looking at this human skeleton and suddenly you said ‘He’s lost weight’ and the whole class cracked up.”

“I’d forgotten that. I wish I wasn’t good at forgetting things, but I am. It’s one of my talents.”

“I wish it was one of mine.”

“I think what I mean is that I have no way of knowing if a skeleton on the inside of a person looks the same as it does on the outside. I assume it does, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it changes colour when exposed to air.”

“Yuck.”

“Also feelings. I know what feelings look like on the outside. I can even copy them sometimes. But do they feel the same on the inside as they look like they do on the outside? It’s a puzzle.” Rin put her head back and closed her eyes. “Friends should be able to talk about their feelings to each other, and I can’t even do that. I think I’m a terrible person.”

“And I think,” said Emi, sliding down off the stool, “that you’re about the least terrible person I’ve ever-“

“ _Emi!_ ”

She froze. That had been Lilly’s voice, echoing up from the somewhere outside the room. Not a call, or even a yell.

It was a scream.


	19. Fight / Flight

Ever since the previous evening, when she had seen those melancholy photographs of Yamaku in Rin’s book, Emi Takada had been afraid.

Frustratingly, she didn’t know exactly why. Emi was a practical young woman; ghosts and bad omens were entertaining fictions to her, nothing more. The quite rational concerns of suffering a physical injury while breaking into an abandoned building, or infringing the law, or encountering the more reclusive varieties of local wildlife didn’t trouble her to any great extent. Even the events of the past few days weren’t a factor - after all, one of the reasons she had accompanied Rin to Sendai was to get away from that ugly business for a while.

But still, for no reason she could adequately name, there had been something about returning to the ruins of her old school that Emi had found deeply unsettling.

By the time she had parked outside the demolition company’s frog-green wall the feeling had solidified; a tightness behind her sternum, a crawling shiver between her shoulder blades that wouldn’t go away. It had caused her to snap so thoughtlessly at Rin outside the open board, to wander Yamaku's empty corridors with the frightened reverence of someone making their way through an ossuary. And, as soon she heard Lilly scream her name for a second time, it had sent her diving for the art room door faster than she’d left any set of running blocks in her life.

Emi didn’t have her blades on, but her everyday prosthetics were hugely advanced compared to the ones she had worn through school. She was out into the corridor within two seconds.

It was empty. “Lilly?”

“ _Down here!_ ”

“Second floor,” said Rin, barrelling out of the doorway.

They reached the end of the hallway together. Emi hammered down the stairs as fast as her legs could function, Rin at her side the whole way, then grabbed at the handrail and swung herself around into the corridor.

Lilly was there. She was standing opposite an open door, back pressed hard to the wall and hands to her mouth. “Emi? Rin, is that you? Are you there?”

“We’re right here, it’s okay.” Emi skated to a halt next to her, put a hand to Lilly’s shoulder. She glanced through the doorway; the room’s blinds were drawn, but there was a little light coming in from the corridor, enough to see that the interior was a jumble of discarded furniture. “Wow, it’s a real mess in there. Did you hurt yourself?”

Lilly shook her head. She was shivering visibly, her face paper-white.

Her cane was on the floor in front of her. Emi stooped to pick it up, and as she did so the smell issuing from within the room hit her.

“Ew, what the hell?” She clamped a hand over had mouth and nose. The air past that open door was rancid, thick with rot.

“This… This was our room, Hanako and I used to eat here.” Lilly choked back a sob. “My cane touched something on the floor, and the smell…  Oh God, Emi. I think... I think there’s someone in there.”

“Seriously?” For several seconds Emi completely failed to grasp what Lilly meant by that – the idea of somebody choosing to remain in such a vile atmosphere didn’t make any sense to her at all.

Then she realised that Lilly hadn’t been talking about anyone capable of leaving. She swallowed hard. “Oh. Right. You mean someone… Oh shit.”

Rin leaned her forehead gently against Lilly’s shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said. “Just stay here. We’ll investigate.”

Emi gave her a lopsided smile. “We will?”

“This requires investigation, so yes.”  

“Okay. Fine.” She peered nervously back through the doorway. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Yamaku’s main building was far larger than it had ever needed to be; several of its classrooms and study areas had been surplus to requirements even before Nakai’s accident had brought it low. Back when Lilly and Hanako had been friends they had unofficially taken this room over for a while, eating lunch there together on most days, rather than in the cafeteria or on the roof like Emi and Rin.

Hanako must have liked the room because it was quiet, Emi guessed. And Lilly because it didn’t have Shizune in it.

_Times have changed_ , Emi thought grimly. _I bet we all wish Shizune was here right now._

After Lilly had left for Scotland the room must have fallen back into disuse. Perhaps it had been earmarked for storage – what little Emi could see of the far wall was heaped high with boxes and piles of furniture; cupboards and cabinets and stacks of chairs, school desks arranged into lethal-looking towers. An angular, glittering thing that might have been an old overhead projector.

Close to the door, though, was a very different kind of chaos.

About half the room had been hastily cleared, and then several of the desks and filing cabinets had been dragged into a rough circle and tipped over. Benches and chairs had been piled against them, braced in turn by boxes and sprawling piles of books and office supplies.

That unholy shiver was crawling up and down Emi’s spine again. Lilly’s tea-room looked, impossibly, as though something had tried to build a nest in it.

She stepped carefully over the threshold, still covering her nose and trying to breathe as little as possible. “Rin,” she whispered. “Be careful, okay? There’s stuff on the floor.”

Rin was turning her head this way and that, trying to see in every direction at once. “I think there’s stuff everywhere.”

Emi moved close to the circle, saw that there was an open side of it facing the door. Lilly must have walked right into the middle of the nest. Which meant that whatever she had found with the end of her cane was there.

“Emi, look.”

“Hm?” She glanced over to where Rin was standing, saw the woman nod at something on one of the boxes. “What’s that?”

“A flashlight.”

“Does it work?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to touch it. It looks sticky.”

“Everything in here looks…” Emi trailed off. There was something lying inside the circle of furniture. Something lumpy and uneven and covered in what could only have been a stained nylon sleeping-bag.

The rotted odour was strongest here.

Emi could hear whispering. She looked back to the doorway, saw Lilly standing with one hand against the doorframe, the other raised to brush the small silver crucifix she wore around her neck. “ _Don’t let it be her_ ,” she was saying, under her breath. “ _Dear Lord, please don’t it be her…_ ”

Emi couldn’t make her wait any longer. Very quickly, before she had a chance to obey all her instincts and run right out of the room, she reached down and lifted the corner of the sleeping bag.

“What is it?” Rin was at the entrance to the circle. “Can you see it? What is it?”

“Ah…” Emi blinked. “It’s food.”

“What?” gasped Lilly. “What do you mean, food?”

“It’s… Aw _man_.” Emi stepped back, clamping both hands over her face. Lifting the nylon had sent a fresh wave of the odour wafting up at her. “Looks like a bunch of half-eaten lunchboxes, fruit, all kinds of crap. Rin, get out of the way.” She staggered back, away from the nauseating pile of leftovers. “It’s nothing, it’s just somebody’s garbage.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.” Emi stumbled back to the door, sagged against the doorframe and dragged in a long breath of cold corridor air. “But if you wanna go rooting around in it, be my guest.”

“Skipping lunch was a good idea,” said Rin, emerging from the doorway. She looked a little unsteady. “I’m glad you had that one. You’ve gone a very interesting colour.”

Emi smiled weakly at her. “I guess that’s one mystery solved. The Ghost of Yamaku Academy is just some vagrant with bad food hygiene and a sticky flashlight.”

“I’m so sorry.” Lilly was still at the doorway, one hand clamped very hard around the frame. Emi could see that she was shaking.

She reached up to cover Lilly’s hand with hers. “Are you gonna be okay?”

The woman nodded, turned her head to Emi. Her cheeks were wet. “Thank you. Thank you both so much. And I’m sorry I startled you.” She drew in a shivering breath. “But for an awful moment, for some reason I thought it might be...”

“Easy mistake to make. None of us actually knows what a dead person smells like.” Then Emi saw the look on Lilly’s face, and realised what she’d meant. “Hey, listen. She’s safe, okay? She’s not even back in the country yet, you know that.”

“I know, I know. What I was thinking makes no sense at all.” Lilly turned from the doorway, squared her shoulders. “I’m sorry, I’m being so foolish.”

“Don’t mention it. We’re all rattled.”

“I don’t like this.” Rin was shuffling nervously. “There’s something not right about this. Emi, I’d like to go now, please.”

“You’re sure?” Emi checked her watch. “I know this was kind of a shock, but it’s just one room.”

“How do you know it’s just one?”

Emi opened her mouth to reply, then she thought about the implications of what Rin had just said, and closed it again.

For several long, uncomfortable seconds, nobody said anything at all. There was no sound in the corridor other than the last fading echoes of Rin’s voice, and the faint, rhythmic scrape of her sandals on the dusty floor.

Then Emi nodded. “You know what? This has been fun, but I think I’m done here. Lilly?”

“Oh, my curiosity has been quite satisfied, I assure you.”

“Rin?”

“There are better places to be than here. I think we should go to some of them.”

“Okay, that’s a unanimous vote for getting the hell out of here.” She took Lilly’s arm. “Hey, maybe we could call Shiina and Shizune. If they’re done too, we could grab a late lunch.”

“Emi, honestly.” Lilly unfolded her cane. “Are you seriously telling me you’re hungry, after what you found in there?”

“No, but by the time we get together I will be. A girl’s got to plan ahead.”

 

By the time they reached the lobby Emi had almost gotten the reek of spoiled food out of her nostrils. The air down on ground level seemed fresher than in the corridors and classrooms, and walking out of the stairwell and into that high pale space felt like leaving a tunnel. 

Partway down the ramp Lilly paused to call Shiina. Emi led Rin a little further down, then stopped at the safety rail. She leaned over it, blinking down into the gloom of the cafeteria level.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked.

“In what?”

“You know.” Emi nodded upwards, at the shadowed ceiling. “This. You don’t feel like we came a long way for nothing?”

Rin tilted her head quizzically. “It wasn’t for nothing. “

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure,” mimicked Rin, cheekily. She stepped to the rail next to Emi, turned and put her back against it. “Consider cake.”

“I do that a lot.”

“Sometimes I’ll see a cake. And I’ll think, that’s a yummy looking cake. I want that cake. I _need_ that cake.”

“Been there,” grinned Emi. “Done that.”

“Yes, it’s a fundamental human experience. And by the time I finally buy the cake it’s the best cake, a mythic cake. A cake of which songs will be sung by ragged bards in the ruins of future civilisations.”

“Okay…”

“Then I eat it. And it’s just a cake. It’s a yummy cake, but no yummier than most other cakes. And now I’m sticky and a bit queasy and there’s cream on my nose.” Rin closed her eyes thoughtfully. “Sex is often the same.”

Emi coloured. “Let’s stick with the cake thing for now, yeah?”

“Coming back here was going to be amazing. It was going to change me, redefine me. But it’s just a big box.” Rin opened her eyes, turned to Emi. “It was quite a nice box before they started knocking it down, but no nicer than lots of other boxes. I could never be certain of that if I hadn’t come back. So I did and now I am.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Also a little hungry, maybe.”

“Talking about cake will do that.”

“Yes. And the other thing.” Rin paused. Then: “I’m not disappointed, because I learned something very important today. I learned that I didn’t start becoming me when I came here. I thought that was true but it’s not.” She smiled. “I started to become me when I met you.”

Suddenly, Emi found it rather hard to speak. “Me?” she managed.

“Yes.” Rin nodded. “I didn’t get to finish what I was saying up in the art room. I know it’s hard being my friend. But I’m really, really glad you are.”

Emi lurched forwards and buried her head in Rin’s chest, wrapped her arms around tightly. “Me too.”

She felt Rin nuzzle the top of her head. “I wish I could hug you back.”

“You are,” Emi whispered. “You’re doing just fine.”

There was a faint tapping from further up the ramp. Emi reluctantly extricated herself from Rin to see Lilly walking down towards her, cane in one hand and her phone in the other. “Hey.”

“Emi? Is everything all right? You sound, um…”

“Sorry.” She sniffed. “Didn’t expect to get all emotional here. I guess it snuck up on me. Did you get through to Shiina?”

“I didn’t, no.” Lilly slipped her phone back into her bag. “I tried three times - I’m sure I was making contact, but she didn’t pick up.”

“I’ll give her a try.” Emi took out her own phone, swiped it into life and checked the status bar. “Yeah, I’m getting a good signal. Hold on.”

Shiina’s number was on Emi’s speed dial; she tapped the icon, listened to the phone purr for a few seconds. “Maybe she’s busy?”

“Perhaps she left her phone in Shizune’s car.”

“Yeah. Or she might not hear it ringing if it’s in her bag. I’ve done- Oh, wait a second. I think I’ve got her.”

The purring had ceased with the faint, familiar click of connection. Emi waited for Shiina’s voice to follow, but for several seconds all she heard was silence.

Then: “ _Hello?_ ”

Emi blinked in surprise. The voice had been male, deep and curt. No-one she recognised. “Ah, I’m sorry, I might have got the wrong number. Is Shiina there?”

Another pause. “ _May I ask who’s speaking, please?_ ”

That hard, cold knot of unease was starting to form in Emi’s chest again. “I could ask you the same question, pal. Is this Shiina’s phone or isn’t it?”

“ _I’m sorry, I can’t_ -” The man’s voice cut off, oddly. The phone was still connected, but he had simply stopped talking. Then, before Emi could speak, she heard a strange clattering noise from the other end of the line. A shout, too faint for her to make out, but sounding very much like a cry of pain. Scraping sounds.

And finally, Shiina Mikado’s voice, quite strained and almost painfully loud. “ _Let go! Give it back!_ ”

“Shiina? Is that you?”

“ _Emi! Oh thank God, Emi…_ ” Shiina’s voice had dipped a little in volume, but she sounded breathless, tearful. “ _I could hear the phone ringing but it was in Mrs Umeda’s office and I had to run out of the ambulance and the policeman wouldn’t give it to me…_ ”

“Whoah, what?” Emi stared, then stepped closer to Rin and Lilly. “Hold on, I’m putting you on speaker. What ambulance, what’s going on back there?”

“ _Emi, he’s got Shicchan!_ ”

“Shiina,” said Lilly, her voice very cool and controlled. “Please calm down as much as you can. What do you mean?”

Emi heard Shiina suck in a long breath. “ _That man, that one who sent the letters. He’s called Ryo, Ryoichi Umeda, Shicchan and I were talking to his mother and he attacked us. He hit me on the head, and Shicchan was on the ground, he was hitting her and hitting her and I couldn’t…_ ” Her voice dissolved into sobs for a few seconds, then: “ _Oh Emi, I don’t even know if she’s alive. He dragged her into his car, he drove off…_ ”

“When was this?” Lilly asked.

“ _About half an hour ago._ ” Shiina sniffed loudly. “ _Mrs Umeda called the police and the ambulance. They think he’s going to his grandfather’s place, they’re going to try and catch him there_.”

“Umeda…” said Emi. “Wait, the rifle guy?”

“ _Yeah. The head caretaker at Yamaku was his stepdad, Ryo, I mean, but they didn’t get on, so he used to run away to Jiro’s place when they had rows._ ”

“Oh no,” Emi breathed.

The hooded man was the stepson of Yamaku’s chief caretaker. A caretaker would have access to keys and tools. Keys to open the lobby’s front doors and unlock storage rooms. Tools to switch the water back on. “Listen, Shiina?”

“ _Yes, Emi?_ ”

“You need to tell the police he might not be going there. Someone’s been hiding out here at the school, it might have been him. Tell them there’s a chance he might head to Yamaku instead.”

“More than a chance,” said Lilly quietly.

Emi looked up, saw her standing very stiff and upright, facing the lobby’s main door. Rin was staring in the same direction.

She turned, slowly, saw a dark figure waiting motionless at the base of the ramp.

“Tell them he’s here,” she whispered, and slipped the phone into her pocket.

The man must have walked through the doors with his head down, his view partly obscured by the hood of his thick black top. He’d gotten several paces into the lobby before noticing the three women halfway up the ramp.

Now he was standing, as still as a statue, between Emi and the door. He was quite tall, his broad shoulders sloping a little under the hoodie, and he was carrying something long and dark in his right hand; a crowbar, maybe. A large plastic bottle hung from the other, as though full.

What she could see of his face was a mask of shock.

_He wasn’t expecting this,_ Emi thought wildly. _He didn’t think anyone would be here. Certainly not us._

_God almighty, he must think we’ve been tracking him down._

Lilly had taken a step sideways, towards the middle of the ramp. She was slowly folding her cane. “Ryo, is it?” she said. “Ryoichi Umeda?”

Emi’s eyes widened a little. “ _What are you doing?_ ” she hissed.

Lilly didn’t answer her. Instead, she took a step forwards. “You know I can’t see you, Ryo. But I can hear you, standing there. I can hear your breath, your heartbeat. I know where you are.”

Very slowly, Emi reached into her bag, found the pepper spray and drew it out.

“So come on!” Lilly snarled suddenly, her voice echoing harshly around the lobby. “What are you waiting for?”

Impossibly, at the sound of her words, the hooded man actually _flinched_.

“This isn’t new to you, is it, Ryo? Attacking unarmed women?” Lilly stepped forwards again. “You’ve shot at us. You’ve driven at us. You’ve beaten us. _When we’re alone_. But we’re not alone now, are we?” She put one foot forwards, one fist bunched, the other clenched hard around the folded cane. “ _You are._ So come on, _scunner!_ Show us what you’re made of!”

The man took a pace back. Emi could see his hood moving jerkily from left to right. He was looking at all three of them, as if trying to work out what to do.

And then, before she could shout a warning, he made his decision. He drew his arm back and hurled the crowbar, as hard as he could, directly at Rin’s head.

Rin twitched aside and the crowbar hissed past. Emi heard it clatter onto the ramp behind her.

That almost effortless display of flexibility, along with Lilly’s defiance, must have been too much for the hooded man. Emi saw him jolt back in shock, and then he was turning, scrambling away, the plastic bottle thudding heavily onto the littered floor.

He wrenched the door open and stumbled through. It slammed closed in his wake.

Emi whirled. “Holy _shit_ , Lilly!”

“Please tell me that worked,” Lilly whispered. “Please tell me he’s gone.”

“Gone? He went off like a jackrabbit! Probably thinks you actually _can_ hear his heart beating, the idiot.” Emi saw a relieved, rather nervous smile appear on Lilly’s face. “And Rin, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!”

Rin’s eyes were very wide. “Could you tell my legs that, please, because I don’t think I can move them right now.”

“That’s okay, you don’t need to. Lilly, call the cops, tell them what’s happened. Then both of you find somewhere to hide in case he comes back.”

Lilly was already dialling. “Where are you going?”

“After him.” Emi began to make her way down the ramp. “He might still have Shizune – we can’t let him get away now.”

“No, wait.” Rin was trotting after her. “Emi, you can’t. He’ll kill you.”

“He’ll kill Shizune if I don’t.” She paused at the door, peering through the dusty glass. “I’m just going to follow him, okay? To make sure the police know where to go. If they miss him he’ll get away and we’ll never be safe.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you need to be here with Lilly.” The way looked clear. She turned back to Rin. “I’m fastest on my own, you know that.”

“Emi, I’m scared.” Rin’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.” She reached up, pulled Rin’s head down to hers until their foreheads met. “Say Goodbye Emi.”

Rin’s shut her eyes tightly. “No.”

“Then I’ll just have to come back, won’t I?” Emi leaned up on her toes, her lips brushing Rin’s for a moment, and then she was turning away, opening the door and stepping out before she could change her mind.

 

The hooded man was making no attempt to hide his departure. The open board was hanging from one splintered corner when she reached it, as if Ryoichi had battered straight through it in his haste to get away. He was no longer interested in keeping his hideout a secret, that much was certain. With the police already on his tail, and after encountering three witnesses who knew exactly who he was and what he had done, it was clear that escape was the only thing on his mind.

That made Emi feel better about her chances of making it to the car without being ambushed, but it also gave her an unnerving insight into the man’s physical strength. Had Ryoichi decided to attack them with the crowbar instead of merely hurling it in a panic, he could probably have overpowered all three women with little effort.

If he caught her out here, alone, he would murder her barehanded. Emi had no doubt of that.

She scrambled up to the wall, almost colliding with the fibreboard in her haste, and pressed herself against the nearest unbroken panel. Through the opening, stacks of building materials threw long, hard shadows across the rutted ground, the trees beyond them dark and heavy with threat. Even without moving Emi could see a hundred places a man in dark clothing could hide, ready to leap at her as soon as she stepped into the open.

She raised the pepper spray like a talisman and ducked out past the broken panel, just as the sludge-green flank of Ryoichi’s car slid past the end of the wall. Picking up speed, but still slow enough for her to see something in the back seat; a dark form, rising up and then tumbling away from her.

Emi put her head down and sprinted for the Mazda.

The hire car was further away than she remembered, and she was sweating hard by the time she slid into the driver’s seat, her thighs aching, heartbeat a thudding clamour in her chest. The extra distance had cost her a minute or so, but Emi wasn’t sorry she had parked the Mazda out of sight. Any closer, and Ryoichi might have stopped to knife her tyres again.

Besides, she still had an edge on him. Ryo had driven to her right, towards the same twisting road she had taken to reach the school. But there was there was another way, a steep single-lane track that led up to the bus station, cutting across the main highway twice on its way from the far western edge of town.

Emi started the Mazda, swung the big car out into a tight left turn. The narrow road was one-way only, considered too steep for buses to drive safely down, but she didn’t care much about that right now. As long as she didn’t meet anything coming up towards her, she could still overtake the green car and be ready to drop in behind it at the lower junction.

She knew the roads well. In happier days she had jogged them both, dozens of times. “You’re on my turf now, you son of a bitch,” she muttered.

The turning was ahead of her, _No Entry_ signs flanking a road so narrow and overhung it looked like a tunnel carved out of the forest. She slowed, pulled the car hard around, and felt the road drop from beneath her. For an awful moment she couldn’t see the way forwards at all, just the blunt red nose of the Mazda hovering in darkness. It was like driving over a cliff.

Her stomach lurched. Jogging up this route on her running blades had been hard work, but no preparation for steering a car back down the other way.

Then she was in shadow, between looming, overhanging trees, their bare branches so close they seemed to be knitting a canopy over her head. She caught a glimpse of metal barriers on either side of the car, hemming her in, and tried not to dwell on how dented and scratched they were. Instead she gripped the wheel painfully tight, eased her foot off the brake, and let gravity draw her down towards the foot of the mountain.

 

There was no sign of the green Ford at the first junction. It wasn’t until the second crossroads, only a few hundred metres above the town itself, that Emi saw Ryoichi’s car.

It wasn’t moving.

She cursed under breath, slammed her foot down hard on the brake. She had been expecting to wait for the hooded man to drive past below her, letting her follow unseen, but something must have alerted him to her plan. Perhaps he had seen her at the earlier junction, or been checking to make sure he wasn’t followed and spotted her driving down into the steeper track.

Had she underestimated him? Nothing she had seen him do up until now would have made her think he had the wit for such caution. But there he was, his ugly, slab-sided old Ford parked on a slip-road just shy of the crossroads itself, almost invisible against the wall of trees and scrub behind.

The Mazda pulled up. Emi reached into her pocket for the phone, but as her fingers brushed it, something in the back of Ryoichi’s car moved.

A face had appeared in the window, bruised and pale, one hand raised to hold a pair of broken glasses in place.

Emi gasped. Shizune was in the back seat, looking right at her. And there was Ryoichi, a dark, shapeless thing in his covering hood, hunched over the steering wheel to stare down the winding road.

He wasn’t looking up at Emi. He didn’t know she was there. He was looking at the flashing blue lights approaching from between the trees.

He was waiting for them to go past him.

Emi twisted in her seat, staring down the road towards the approaching police cars. They were seconds away, at most, far too close to warn. They would drive up the mountain road, past Ryoichi and his battered prisoner, and the green car would drive slowly out behind them, into the town and away.

Ryoichi would find a quiet spot, and rid himself of the one witness he still had power over.

There were no options left, Emi realised, save one. And the only thing she could do was the worst thing she could imagine.

“Rin,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

She reached up, flicked on the Mazda’s overhead light to make sure Shizune could see her. Then, in an exaggerated mime, wrapped both arms over her head.

When she lowered them again, Shizune was nodding.

Emi sucked in one long, shuddering breath, then stamped her foot down hard.

The Mazda lurched, the purr from the big engine rising to a howl, and the car seemed to leap under her. She was still on a steep slope, the road was dry and the tyres warm. Gravity, friction and torque were all on her side.

Within a second, she couldn’t have reigned the car in even if she’d wanted to.

She saw Shizune surging up from her seat, reaching forwards to grab Ryoichi’s black hood and tug it down over his face. She only managed to hold on for a second or two before he wrenched himself free, but by then it was far too late. He just had enough time to turn, raise his fist in preparation to strike the woman again, before he noticed Emi bearing down on him.

And in that final moment, she saw him clearly for the first and last time; his hood down, his face turned towards her, eyes wide and mouth agape in disbelieving horror. He looked so unremarkable, so ordinary, that she could find no hatred in her heart for him. No pity, or curiosity, or anger. She felt nothing for him at all.

Perhaps there just wasn’t time.

Emi Takada closed her eyes. “ _Dad,_ ” she whispered.


	20. With Regret

“Miss Satou? Are you all right?”

Lilly jolted upright in her seat. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Is everything all right?” Marcus asked her, this time in English. “You stopped typing ten minutes ago. I just wondered if there was a problem.”

“Oh dear.” She had been completely lost in her own thoughts - a rather too regular occurrence, in the past few days. “I didn’t realise it had been so long.”

He sounded a little embarrassed. “Ah, I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“Not at all.” She smiled reassuringly. Marcus had been so protective of her, ever since she had returned from Sendai. She was finding it rather oppressive, an irony that was far from lost on her. “And no, nothing’s wrong. I’m just finding this particular message rather difficult to start.”

He leaned close. She heard the rustle of his clothing, smelled his skin and his cologne, felt the slight warmth of him. “Looks like you’ve written a lot already.”

“The body of the text is largely done, that’s true.” She sighed. “But a beginning, as they say, is a very delicate time...”

“We’ll, I suppose you could tell her it’s snowing.”

“Oh my, really?”

“Started about half an hour ago, I think.” His voice moved away. He was going to the window. “Don’t worry, it’s not heavy. Shouldn’t be any travel issues.”

“That’s a relief.” Lilly had plans for the evening. “Although I’m sure my English teacher told me that one should never start a composition by describing the weather.”

“It’s an email to your sister,” said Marcus, with a distinct smile in his voice. “Not a novel.”

“You don’t know my sister.” Lilly put her arms out, locked her fingers together and stretched, rolled her head around. She had been sitting at her desk for a long time. “Akira will tease me unmercifully if I get too cliché. She’s become quite the critic, of late.”

“Your mother’s literary ambition rubbing off on her?”

Lilly hid a grin behind her hand. “I’ll not dignify that with answer, dear.”

The office was very quiet. The rest of the staff had gone home almost an hour before, while Lilly finished up the day’s correspondence. And then, when only she and Marcus remained, she had started writing her letter to Akira, taking an opportunity to use the Foundation’s bespoke software.

But he was right, she had to start somewhere, even if her sister would take her to task for it later. Marcus wouldn’t leave the office until she did, after all. She was keeping him from his evening.

She put her fingertips to the keyboard, finding the guide studs on reflex, and then quickly tapped out an introduction to her letter. Then she sat back, took the headset from around her neck and put it on, positioning the tiny microphone at her lips.

“Paragraph one, line one.” she said. “Begin.”

“ _Dear Akira_ ,” the machine replied, in the clear, eerily gender-neutral voice the Foundation favoured for its software. “ _It is snowing in Tokyo._ ”

_Oh dear,_ thought Lilly.

“ _I suppose this is appropriate, given that we are now only a week away from Christmas, but it does make me feel a little wistful. Please don’t misunderstand me, I love Japan – in many ways it’s home to me in a way that Scotland can never be – but there is just something about Christmas in Inverness, don’t you agree?_

_And no, dear sister, not simply in terms of whiskey.”_

Lilly smiled wryly. Without realising it, she’d gotten her revenge in early.

“ _I wonder if it has snowed there yet?_ ” the machine continued. “ _It seems so long since we’ve been in touch. I know it’s only been a few days – your phone calls and emails after Sendai were such a help, I can’t thank you enough – but the intervening time has been so manic that I hardly feel we’ve spoken properly at all._

_However, I do hope that things will start to become less frantic from now on, at least in terms of the Umeda case._ ”

“Pause,” Lilly said. Was she being melodramatic? _Umeda Case_ sounded like something from a bad detective drama. Then again, she really didn’t know what else to call it.

Akira would come up with some suggestions, she had no doubt. “Continue.”

_“I have been told by the police that my input is no longer required, which is a huge relief. In fact their investigations seem to be almost complete, to the extent that they released the Yamaku site back to the demolition company last week._

_Yes, our old school is finally gone. I can’t say that I’m sorry, not any more. Finding out that Ryoichi Umeda had been skulking there for months, fouling room after room with his nasty, paranoid little nests has quite destroyed any lingering nostalgia I might have had about the place._

_Perhaps I should thank him for finally letting me move on from what happened there, all those years ago, but I cannot bring myself to. He doesn’t deserve even that iota of respect._

_Only now, as time passes and certain information becomes available, are we truly finding out what a pitiful specimen our tormentor turned out to be. He doesn’t even have the excuse that the death of his father sent him down a bad path – he had been in trouble with the law long before then, multiple minor infringements for vandalism and the like. It seems he was always the self-pitying type, forever blaming others for his own inadequacies, although how he progressed from that to attempted murder is a story in which, I must confess, I have little interest._

_I feel for his mother, I really do._ ”

“Pause.” Lilly slipped her headset back. “Marcus, how is the weather?”

“Pretty,” he replied. “It’s not even settling yet, you’re fine.”

“Thank you.” She put the headset back in place, made the metal switch from English back to Japanese. “Continue,” she said.

“ _Still, I don’t believe he will trouble us again for a long time. For some reason he seemed intent on surrounding himself with evidence of his crimes – the defaced yearbook, from which our photographs were crudely cut, was in the trunk of his car, along with the scrapbooks, keys and tools he’d stolen from his late stepfather. I have been told – I will not say by whom – that several vintage rifle bullets were discovered there too._

_When the police arrived at Yamaku that evening we were able to give them the crowbar he had used on poor Shiina, along with the container of gasoline he dropped as he fled. I believe he thought he could burn down the school with that, or at least cover up some evidence of his presence there._

_At this stage, no-one knows whether Ryoichi Umeda will face prison for his crimes, or will become a guest of the same flawed mental health system that so nearly devoured Rin. I have to be honest, I cannot quite make up my mind which of these fates I would wish upon him._

_But enough about that man. He doesn’t deserve our consideration. I’ll not mention him again._

_On to more relevant matters, then._

_You will be pleased to hear that Shiina and Shizune have both recovered well from their ordeal. Shiina suffered a very minor skull fracture during the attack, but nothing that required more than a couple of days in hospital. It certainly didn’t stop her passing her advanced signing and teaching qualification exams this week. Who would have thought, back in the days of the Student Council, that she would come so far? I wonder if she doesn’t match Shizune for drive, at times._

_And in answer to all those rather prurient hints in your last email; yes, I believe they are still very much an item, and I have rarely seen Shizune so happy._

_Emi Takada is, I’m afraid, no longer with us._ ”

“Pause,” said Lilly quickly. “Delete last sentence. Edit.”

She regretted even typing those words. The joke was in poor taste, and entirely redundant: Akira already knew that the injuries Emi had sustained in the crash had been minor. The Mazda’s multiple airbags had saved her from serious harm, although she had been trapped in the vehicle for a while.

Thankfully, car safety had come a long way in the years since her first, near-fatal crash.

In fact, Ryoichi Umeda had spent longer in hospital than Emi, although there were rumours that not all his injuries were precisely consistent with the crash itself. Lilly had her own theories about that. Shizune had been knocked around by the impact, but she’d had time to fling herself to the other side of the Ford before the hire car struck it, so was very quickly back on her feet after the glass stopped flying. And, given that she had already freed herself from the duct tape Ryoichi had bound her with, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility for her to have sought out a suitable piece of debris and used it to make sure he was incapable of causing any further trouble for a while.

Lilly hadn’t asked Shizune about that yet, and probably wouldn’t. Perhaps it was a mystery best left unsolved.

One thing was confirmed, though. Once out of the Ford, Shizune had immediately found her way to Emi’s side and stayed with her until the emergency services found them. She had silently taken the terrified, traumatised young woman’s hand and held it, refusing to let go until the ambulances arrived.

Just thinking about that made Lilly shiver a little. She quickly typed in a new paragraph, then set the machine speaking again.

“ _Emi Takada is now Emi Ibarazaki once more, and intends to remain so for the foreseeable future. Once the local media began to report on how a valiant young para-athlete foiled a kidnapping, helped apprehend a criminal and very probably saved the life of her friend, all legal impediments to her divorce magically faded away. She was in some trouble with the hire car company for a while – she had extensively damaged a rather nice Mazda, after all – but my good friend Marcus at the Foundation made that issue, in his words, ‘go away’._

_Open brackets. In spite of all the good it does, sometimes my employer’s reach unnerves me. Rin Tezuka seems convinced their headquarters actually lie within an extinct volcano somewhere. Close brackets._

_Which brings me to the part of this email that, I must confess, I have not been looking forward to writing._

_I’m afraid that I won’t be home for Hogmanay as we’d hoped. In fact, it appears as though I shall be staying in Japan for the next several months, at least. For the best of reasons, I might add, but still…_

_The Foundation’s proposed new venture here is expanding. The initial school is already fully subscribed for its first year, and a secondary site is being funded. I believe that some members of the Yamaku teaching staff have already been contacted about this (although I have made sure that a certain art teacher has not been among them). And, it seems, the Foundation is thinking of choosing this secondary site to branch out into taking on deaf students as well as the blind and partially-sighted._

_If they do, I believe we both know someone who will make a most excellent teacher._

_Anyway, my dear sister, please take good care of yourself and Mother. I will call you both very soon. And now I must venture out into the snow – an old friend has just returned home to Japan, and we are meeting for tea._

_I think we will have a lot to talk about._

_With all my love, Lilly_.”

“Save,” Lilly told the computer. “Send to Akira Satou.”

A soft chime told her that the message was on its way. She took off the headset and stood up, stretching her arms up above her head, feeling her spine crackle slightly. “Ouch.”

“Are you all right?” Marcus asked. She heard faint clicks and whirrs as he shut the computer down for her.

“I’m fine, thank you. Just paying the price for my immobility.” Lilly took her cane from the desk and unfolded it, then made her way over to a row of hooks on the wall. Her fingertips brushed the soft collar of her coat. “I’m so sorry for keeping you here, Marcus. I should have finished ages ago.”

“Don’t mention it.” He was at her side, shrugging into his own jacket. “There’s always something to catch up on.”

“I’m sure you have plans, though.”

“A torrid evening of snacks, Sapporo and my new CSI boxed set.” He paused while she put her coat on. Then: “How will they take it, do you think?”

“Reading over my shoulder?”

“Your headphones leak.” He must have seen her expression change. “Just a little. Not normally a problem, but when the office is empty…”

“That’s a relief. I’d hate to disturb anyone. And as for home, well. Mother will complain that I am leaving her to deal with Akira and her latest beau alone. Akira will accuse me of leaving her to deal with Mother alone.” She smiled, straightening her scarf. “But then the house will fill up with guests, and I will be forgotten.”

“I’m flying home for New Year. There’s no reason you couldn’t do the same.”

“On the contrary, I have five very good reasons.” She felt his elbow nudge hers, and took his arm. “Shall we?”

He stopped for a second as they reached the door. She heard a click, and the faint buzzing of overhead lights – so quiet and pervasive that she always failed to notice it until it was gone – died away.

Then Lilly Satou closed the door, and let Marcus lead her out into the night.


	21. Coda

“ _Dad?_ ”

There was no answer. There never was. All Emi Ibarazaki could do was lie there in the dark, listening to the phone ring while the dream’s last sobs choked their way out of her.

“Damn it,” she muttered.

She sat up, wiped a hand roughly across her eyes, clearing her vision enough to let her read the phone’s clock display: _03:23_. She picked up the handset.

“Hello?”

There was a very long silence. For a minute, maybe two, Emi heard nothing except the soft buzz of the line and an occasional breath on the other end of the phone, very faint. She had recognised the number on the caller display, though, so instead of retreating into shivering panic she merely waited, and listened, and used the quiet time to get her breathing back under control.

Finally, Rin spoke. “ _I had this dream_ ,” she said flatly.

“When?”

“ _When I was asleep._ ”

“That’s a pretty good time to have one. What was it about?”

“ _It was about you,_ ” Rin replied. “ _Don’t get any ideas, it wasn’t that kind of dream, although I have those too and I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud. Mm_.”

“Careful, I’m a divorced woman. Anything could happen.”

“ _Promises_.”

Emi found herself wondering if Rin was in bed too, or whether she had fallen asleep painting. “What kind of dream was it, then?”

“ _It was…_ ”

The line went silent again. “Rin?”

“ _It was the kind of dream where you weren’t okay. And I had to call you up and make sure it really was just a dream and you’re okay after all. Are you okay?_ ”

“Yeah.” What was it Rin occasionally said? “For a given value of okay, I’m okay.”

“ _You’ve been crying, though_.”

“Dreaming.”

“ _Oh_.”

“You know, when I can’t run, things… Things catch up with me.”

“ _You’ll start running again soon, though? So you can get away from the things again?_ ”

“Yeah. I saw the doctor and my coach today, and they said it’s okay if I start slow.” The impact had damaged muscles in Emi’s back, left thigh, right shoulder. A tendon in her right knee was giving everyone concern. “I’m going jogging with Shiina tomorrow. I mean today. Later today.”

“ _I didn’t notice the time, I’m sorry_.”

“Don’t be,” Emi whispered. “Don’t ever not call, Rin, no matter what time it is. I mean it.”

“ _There will come a day when you’ll regret saying that_.”

Despite the tears, Emi blurted a laugh. “So we’re still on for this evening?”

“ _Yes. I have cake. You can bring Shiina if you like_.”

“Nah, she’s going out with Shizune. But we’ll see them both at the weekend.”

“ _Wow_ ,” said Rin, in what sounded like genuine surprise. “ _We have a social life. When did that happen? Anyway, don’t be late. I’m making a picture for Lilly_.”

“Uh, how’s that going to work?”

“ _Textures. I need you to come over and not see it. Blindfolds may be involved_.”

“That sounds fun. And kinda naughty.” Then Emi took a long, not entirely steady breath. “Rin? Are we gonna be okay? I mean really?”

“ _I don’t know. Future Rin is different from now Rin. They don’t talk much_.”

“I just…” She wiped her eyes again. “Every time I go to cross the road my heart goes crazy. I see some guy in a hoodie, and… Rin, what if he gets out? What if they don’t prosecute him right, or he escapes, or he’s in for a year and then he gets out and comes after us?”

“ _I thought that too_ ,” said Rin. “ _For a long time. Then I remembered what Lilly said_.”

“What about?”

“ _Well, when he did those things to us, he did them when we were alone. But we’re not alone, are we? Not anymore_.”

“No,” Emi breathed. “No, he is.”

“ _So, as long as I don’t let you out of my sight, we’ll be fine_.” There was a rustling on the other end of the line. Rin was in bed after all, her speakerphone picking up the sound of her futon as she moved. “ _You should go back to sleep_.”

“Right now that’s the last thing I want to do.” Emi pulled herself up a little straighter. “So, what else have you dreamed?”

“ _You want to hear about that?_ ” Rin’s voice sounded very small. “ _Really?_ ”

“Really,” Emi told her, settling back into her pillows. “You used to tell me about your dreams all the time. I’ve missed it.”

“ _I dream quite a lot, you know_.”

Emi smiled into the dark. “Then I guess I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”


End file.
